Ukraine: at least 17 killed in attack on housing in Zaporizhzhia

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At least 17 people have been killed by Russian shelling of a residential area in Ukraine’s south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, a region the Kremlin illegally claims to have annexed despite not controlling all of it.

The overnight attack happened in the aftermath of a devastating explosion on a key bridge linking Russian-occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland, a prestige project of the president, Vladimir Putin. The blast seriously damaged the 12-mile-long (19km) structure, which serves as an important military supply route.

The Zaporizhzhia strike came as Ukrainians – jubilant over the damage to the Kerch bridge, a hated symbol of Putin’s ambitions – were bracing for a major retaliation by Moscow, which had warned Kyiv against targeting the structure.

Images from the aftermath in Zaporizhzhia showed a nine-storey building in the city still burning and partially collapsed as rescue workers sought to retrieve the dead and wounded, with the regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, warning there may be more people under the rubble.

The city council secretary, Anatoliy Kurtev, said rockets had struck Zaporizhzhia overnight, and at least 20 private homes and 50 apartment buildings had been damaged.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, described the latest attack as “absolute evil”. “Zaporizhzhia again. Merciless strikes on peaceful people again. On residential buildings, just in the middle of the night,” he said on Telegram, adding that 49 people, including six children, were in hospital.

“Absolute meanness. Absolute evil. Savages and terrorists, from the one who gave this order to everyone who fulfilled this order. They will bear responsibility, for sure. Before the law and before people.”

The strikes on Zaporizhzhia appear to be part of a deliberate tactic also used against other cities close to the conflict’s frontlines, including Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Sloviansk, which have been struck repeatedly.

Zaporizhzhia is close to the frontline where Kyiv’s forces have been carrying out a large-scale counterattack against Russian troops. The Ukrainian-controlled industrial city is in the Zaporizhzhia region, also home to the Russian-occupied nuclear plant that has been the site of heavy shelling.

In recent weeks, Russia has repeatedly struck the city. At least another 19 people died on Thursday in Russian missile strikes on apartment buildings in Zaporizhzhia, which in turn followed a Russian strike on a convoy of civilian cars in the region that killed 30 just over a week ago.

The strikes came as Russian divers were due to examine the damage left by the powerful blast on the Kerch bridge, even as it reopened to civilian traffic.

Despite the loss of two lanes of the road bridge, which collapsed into the Kerch Strait, Russian media carried images of a handful of cars using the remaining lanes in what was probably more of a propaganda opportunity than meaningful evidence of the structural soundness of the bridge.

The Russian deputy prime minister Marat Khusnullin said the divers would start work in the morning, with a more detailed survey above the waterline expected to be completed by the end of the day.

“The situation is manageable – it’s unpleasant, but not fatal,” Crimea’s Russian governor, Sergei Aksyonov, told reporters. “Of course, emotions have been triggered and there is a healthy desire to seek revenge.”

The peninsula had a month’s worth of fuel and more than two months’ worth of food, he said. Russia’s defence ministry said its forces in southern Ukraine could be “fully supplied” through existing land and sea routes.

The claim that damage to the bridge would not compromise Russian supply lines comes despite widespread evidence that Russia has struggled with logistics throughout the nine-month war, and the fact that Ukrainian forces are drawing ever closer to its other main supply route in the south following their advances in the Kherson region.

Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and the bridge linking the region to its transport network was opened with great fanfare four years later by Putin.