Nov. 23 (UPI) — Ukrainian emergency officials said on Wednesday a Russian missile strike in the southern Zaporizhzhia region slammed into a hospital’s maternity unit, killing a newborn.
The region, the location of a key nuclear power plant, has been the site of repeated Russian attacks. The hospital is in the Kyiv-controlled town of Vilnyansk, near the front line of fighting.
The child’s mother and a doctor were rescued from the rubble, emergency crews said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strike was an example of how Russia has brought “terror and murder” to the country.
Ukraine said two other people died during shelling on a residential building in Kupiansk, which lies in the northeastern Kharkiv region. Ukraine had reclaimed that area from Russian troops in September.
A new rocket attack hit Kyiv on Wednesday afternoon and hit another infrastructure facility.
“One of the infrastructure facilities of the capital was hit,” Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said in a warning for residents to go to their air raid shelters.
Ukrainian officials reported new Russian attacks in the western city of Lviv, with the governor of the Mykolaiv region saying “many rockets” struck from the south and east.
Government leaders continued to caution Ukrainian citizens about the use of power, saying that nearly all of its thermal and hydroelectric power plants have sustained damage over a weeklong Russian missile and bombing campaign against them.
“The scale of the destruction is colossal,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the head of Ukrenergo, said Tuesday.
Kyiv municipal workers are setting up 1,000 heating shelters that can also be used as bunkers for hundreds. The shelters are filled with essential supplies to last more than a week.
Officials said similar shelters are being prepared in towns and cities across Ukraine.
“All of us must be prepared for any scenario,” Zelensky said. “I am sure: by helping each other, we will all be able to get through this winter together.”
After their success in Kherson, Ukrainian troops are battling Russians on a strategic peninsula at the mouth of the Dnipro River where it meets the Black Sea.
