INA- sources
At least 25 people have been killed after Ukrainian forces shelled a busy suburban shopping area in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, according to local officials.
Alexei Kulemzin, the city’s Russian-installed mayor, said Ukrainian artillery had fired on a bustling district where shops and a market are located. Denis Pushilin, the Russian-appointed head of the Donetsk region, said emergency services were working at the scene, adding that a further 20 people, including two children, had been injured in the strike on the suburb of Tekstilshchik.
Pushilin said the area had been hit by 155mm and 152mm calibre shells fired from the direction of Kurakhove and Krasnohorivka to the west. Local authorities have declared Monday a day of mourning.
Reuters photographs and video taken at the scene showed people crying, some of whom said they had lost relatives, and bodies lying in the snow near one of the city’s markets.
Shattered shopfronts and broken glass could be seen in videos shared by Russian state media, along with what appeared to be bodies lying on the ground nearby.
A local resident called Tatiana said she had heard an incoming projectile overhead, and had hidden under her market stall. “I saw smoke, people screamed, a woman was crying,” she told a local media outlet.
“Where is there anything military here? It’s just a market,” another resident told the same outlet. “This is one of the strongest blows in recent times.”
Russia’s foreign ministry denounced the strike, saying “security threats and acts of terrorism should not be committed from the territory of Ukraine”. In a statement, it added: “These terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime clearly demonstrate its lack of political will towards achieving peace and the settlement of this conflict by diplomatic means.”
Ukraine has not commented on the event and the claims could not be independently verified.
Donetsk is one of four Ukrainian regions that Russia claimed to have annexed in 2022 in a move condemned as illegal by most countries at the UN general assembly. Moscow does not fully control any of the four regions.
Elsewhere, a fire broke out at a chemical transport terminal at Russia’s Ust-Luga port after two explosions on Sunday, regional officials said. Local media reported that Ukrainian drones had attacked the port, causing a gas tank to explode.
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