KYIV: Russian strikes on the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv killed three people and wounded at least a dozen more, officials said on Sunday.

These latest attacks came as Orthodox Christians in Ukraine and Russia celebrated Easter, and as Moscow said its forces had captured another village on the battlefield.

“In Pokrovsk, rocket attacks killed two people and damaged a house,” Vadim Filashkin, Ukraine’s governor of the Donetsk region, said in a post on Telegram.

Pokrovsk is around 60 kilometres (35 miles) northwest of Donetsk city, the Russian-held capital of the region which Moscow claims to have annexed.

Another strike on Monachynivka, in Kharkiv region, killed an 88-year-old woman, said the region’s governor Oleg Synegubov.

Earlier on Sunday, the mayor of Kharkiv said in a series of posts on Telegram that at least 10 people had been wounded in an aerial attack on the city around lunchtime.

“The strike hit the central part of the city in an area of residential buildings,” Igor Terekhov said.

Synegubov said Russia had used a guided aerial bomb in the strike. Russia is making greater use of these extremely destructive weapons, which are launched from planes.

A separate overnight drone attack on the city also wounded six, including a child born in 2015, Synegubov said earlier. Ukraine’s air force said Russia fired 24 Iranian-style “Shahed” drones at its territory overnight, 23 of which were shot down.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2024