VINNYTSIA, Ukraine — A volley of rockets hit a shopping mall, dance studio and wedding hall in central Ukraine on Thursday, killing at least 23 people and starting a frantic search for dozens of missing people in the rubble in the latest attack on civilian targets far from the hit the front line.
Seventy-one people, including three children, were hospitalized after three rockets hit the center of Vinnytsia, a typically sleepy provincial capital, leaving behind a harrowing scene of smoking ruins.
The attack used cruise missiles fired by a Russian submarine in the Black Sea, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office said. It said three children were among the dead in the attack on Vinnytsia, about 240 miles inland from the coast.
“Every day, Russia is destroying the civilian population, killing Ukrainian children and aiming missiles at civilian objects,” said Mr. Zelensky. “What is this, if not an overt act of terrorism?”
Grooms once carried their brides out of the wedding hall, a well-known local landmark, and a building next door once drew children to a photo studio that produced school albums. The missiles hit a club of military officers, a potential target, albeit in a heavily built-up central area of the city.
Even hours later, as firefighters doused the smoldering shells of overturned cars with water, bystanders watched in shock. Ukraine’s state emergency service said 29 people were missing and a search was underway at the rubble in an area of the city where people are shopping.
Russia has paused its pursuit of territory in eastern Ukraine as it regroups battered military units, but Moscow has been reminded daily that its arsenal of long-range weapons can cause death and destruction far from the battlefield, against both civilian and military targets.
The Russian defense ministry, which has repeatedly denied targeting civilians, has not commented on the Vinnytsia attack.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, denounced the Kremlin for the attack, which took place when the Dutch government organized a conference in The Hague to ensure that Russia would be held accountable for human rights violations in Ukraine.
Understanding the war between Russia and Ukraine better
As the international community gathered, Mr Kuleba said: “Russia is committing another war crime.”
On the eve of the conference, the United States called on Russia to immediately stop the forced deportation of Ukrainians to Russian-controlled territory. State Secretary Antony J. Blinken said on Wednesday that the Russian authorities had“questioned,detained and forcibly deported” between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, often to isolated regions in the Far East.
Mr Blinken described the transfers as a violation of international law and “a war crime”. Testimonials given to The New York Times and other news outlets by deportees escaping Russia include reports of interrogations, beatings and torture of persons believed to have links with the Ukrainian armed forces.
Russia has acknowledged that 1.5 million Ukrainians are now in the area it controls, but has claimed they have been evacuated for their own safety.
Just before the strike in Vinnytsia, about 200 marriages and birth registrations were planned, Vasyl Kavatsiuk, an official with the regional justice ministry, said in an interview in the damaged wedding hall, where the floor was covered with shards of glass. Couples in the hall had been evacuated before the strike when an air raid siren sounded.
Later on Thursday, workers carried out boxes of documents and computers to keep what they could.
Across the street in a wedding dress shop, where the windows had been blown out, a tattered wedding dress fluttered in the wind.
The strike shocked nerves in a city that had returned to somewhat normal. The area had seen no significant attacks since early March, days after the Russian invasion cruise missiles hit an airport in the city.
“I recently brought my children back and now I don’t know what to do,” said Vadym Labun, 34, an emergency service worker, who had moved his family to a village outside the city earlier in the war. “I still haven’t spoken to my wife.”
The strike was all the more shocking as the shopping center that had been frequented by locals for decades was destroyed. Shoemakers repaired shoes at stands. Generations of teenagers had their ears pierced at an earring shop in the now-destroyed building.
The explosions shattered windows in shops and buildings hundreds of meters away. A worker, who only offered his first name, Serhiy, out of concern for his safety, was packing boxes at a shop that sold tea and coffee.
“We’re going to rebuild it,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
The missiles damaged about 55 buildings and 40 cars, said Viktor Vitovetsky, an emergency service official. briefing on Thursday. More than 69 rescuers helped clear the rubble and search for survivors, he said.
After the explosions, anxious residents stood on the sidewalks, watching a billowing plume of black smoke billowing from the city center.
“I didn’t have time to get scared because it was a sudden loud noise and a window in my room was blown out,” said Raisa Ludanova, a witness.
Vinnytsia, with a pre-war population of over 370,000, lies west of the Dnipro River, hundreds of miles from the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the centerpiece of Moscow’s military campaign in recent weeks and the suspected target of the next ground offensive.
The strike came amid other recent attacks on populated civilian areas.
A Russian missile destroyed a ceramics factory in the city of Sloviansk, in the eastern province of Donetsk, a regional official said late Wednesday. According to the website, there were no immediate casualties in the strike at the factory, which employed 270 people before the war.
“The Russians are destroying our industrial potential,” said regional military administrator Pavlo Kyrylenko, calling the strike a “serious blow to the region’s economy”.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow on that attack.
In Bakhmut, a city in Donetsk that is an important stronghold for the Ukrainian army and a strategic target for Russian forces, both armies exchanged artillery fire for much of the day on Wednesday.
The city, with leafy streets and brick blocks of flats, had a population of 100,000 before the invasion, but now it looks more and more like a war zone, with large slits ripped through apartment blocks and wide craters in the ground.
On Tuesday evening, rockets hit several homes and damaged a school in Bakhmut. One person has died and five others were injured, police said.
in the south port city of MykolaivFive civilians have been killed in a Russian attack on a hotel, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the president’s office, said Thursday.
And in the eastern village of Chasiv Yar, in Donetsk, the state emergency service said the death toll from an apartment complex strike had risen to 48 over the weekend, making it one of the deadliest strikes since the start of the war.
In June, a rocket hit the Amstor shopping complex in Kremenchuk, a town south of Kiev on the Dnipro River, killing 18 people. A nearby factory was a potential military target. And in April, a rocket hit a railway station in Kramatorsk, killing 59 people, including seven children, and injuring 100 others.
Some military analysts have said that such attacks indicate that Russia is running out of precision weapons and is resorting to less accurate missiles and missiles, or firing indiscriminately at targets, regardless of additional deaths. Others see the civilian casualties as part of a deliberate violent campaign to break Ukraine’s will to resist.
A report from British military intelligence on Thursday said Russian forces “have made no significant territorial progress in the past 72 hours” and that ground forces have been mainly focused on carrying out small “probing attacks” designed to target Ukrainian forces. test defense.
Maria Varenikova reported from Vinnytsia, Ukraine, and Michael Levenson From New York. Reporting contributed by: Carlotta Gallo and Kamila Hrabchuk from Chasiv Yar, Ukraine, Andrew E. Kramer from Kiev, Ukraine, Matthew Mpoke Bigg from Warsaw and Livia Albeck-Ripka from Los Angeles.