‘Dozens killed or injured’ in Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia

Ukraine’s military says overnight shelling caused severe damage to residential buildings in the city.

Dozens of people have been killed in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia after the Russian military shelled the city during the night, the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces says.

“Overnight, the Russian occupiers cynically struck the residential buildings and civil infrastructure,” the military’s central command said on its Facebook page on Sunday.

“Information about victims is being confirmed, but it is already known about dozens of dead or injured.”

Earlier, city official Anatoliy Kurtev said at least 17 people had been killed in an overnight bombardment.

“As a result of an overnight missile attack on Zaporizhzhia, apartment buildings and roads in a residential area of the city have been damaged,” local official Anatoliy Kurtev, the secretary of the city’s administration, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

“At this time, 17 people are known to have died.”

Russia is under increasing pressure on the battlefield in Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces continue to push forward in a counteroffensive that began in the Kharkiv region at the beginning of last month.

On Saturday, Moscow announced a new commander for the war, air force chief Sergey Surovikin, after last month announcing the annexation of four occupied areas, in breach of international law, and the mobilisation of some 300,000 reservists.

The city of Zaporizhzhia is about 125km (80 miles) from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which Russia occupied shortly after invading Ukraine on February 24.

The plant lost its last external power source in the early hours of Saturday morning amid renewed artillery fire and is now reliant on emergency diesel generators to cool the reactors and meet other safety requirements.

All six reactors at Europe’s biggest nuclear plant are shut down.