Russian strike on Ukraine prison kills 17, Kyiv says

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Kyiv (Ukraine) (AFP) — A Russian airstrike on a prison in southeastern Ukraine overnight killed 17 inmates and wounded dozens of others, Kyiv said on Tuesday, after Washington pressured Russia to end its invasion.

The strike came hours after US President Donald Trump issued Moscow with a new deadline to end its grinding invasion of Ukraine — now in its fourth year — or face tough new sanctions.

And it also comes on the three-year anniversary of a strike on another detention facility in occupied Ukrainian territory that Kyiv blamed on Moscow and that was reported to have killed dozens of captured Ukrainian soldiers.

“It was a deliberate strike, intentional, not accidental. The Russians could not have been unaware that they were targeting civilians in that facility,” Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky said, reacting on social media.

Russia carried out eight strikes on the Zaporizhzhia region overnight, hitting the prison, according to Ivan Fedorov, the head of the military administration.

Ukraine’s justice ministry said Moscow’s forces hit the prison with four glide bombs, killing 17 inmates and wounding another 42, including one of the detention centre’s employees.

Bricks and debris were strewn on the ground around buildings with blown-out windows, according to images released by the ministry. The facility’s perimeter was intact and there was no threat that inmates would escape, it added.

Rescue workers were seen searching for survivors in pictures released by the region’s emergency services.

‘War crimes’

A senior Ukrainian source said that 274 people were serving sentences in the Bilenkivska facility, where 30 people worked. The source added there were no Russian war prisoners being held at the centre.

Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets meanwhile said the Zaporizhzhia attack was further evidence of Russian “war crimes.”

“People held in places of detention do not lose their right to life and protection,” he wrote on social media.

In addition to the glide bomb attack, the Ukrainian air force said that Russia had launched 37 drones and two missiles overnight, adding that its air defence systems had downed 32 of the drones only.

People were also killed and more wounded in attacks on the Dnipropetrovsk region, according to regional government officials.

A missile strike on the town of Kamyanske killed two people, wounded five and damaged a hospital, Sergiy Lysak, head of the regional military administration said on Telegram.

Another person was killed and several wounded in an attack on the region’s Synelnykivsky district, he said.

In a separate attack on Velykomykhaylivska, Monday night, a “75-year-old woman was killed. A 68-year-old man was wounded. A private house was damaged,” he posted on Telegram.

In southern Russia, a Ukrainian drone attack killed one person, the region’s acting governor said Tuesday.

“A car was damaged on Ostrovsky Street. Unfortunately, the driver who was in it died,” Yuri Slyusar, acting governor of the Rostov region, said in a post on Telegram.

Kyiv has been trying to repel Russia’s summer offensive, which has made fresh advances into areas largely spared since the start of the invasion in 2022.

Over the weekend, the Russian army said its forces had captured a small settlement in the industrial Dnipropetrovsk region, weeks after it seized the first village in the territory.

Kyiv has contested those claimed Russian advances.

Both Ukraine and Russia blamed each other for the strike over the night of July 29 three years ago on the detention in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, which the Kremlin says is part of Russia.

Ukraine says that dozens of its soldiers who laid down their arms after a long Russian siege of the port city of Mariupol were killed in that attack on the Olenivka detention facility.