ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (Reuters) -Russian airstrikes on a prison and hospital in southeastern Ukraine killed at least 19 people, officials said on Tuesday, while U.S. President Donald Trump said he would start imposing punitive measures on Russia within 10 days if Moscow showed no progress toward ending its war in Ukraine.
Sixteen of the people were killed when Russia bombed a prison in the frontline Zaporizhzhia region in an attack Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said was deliberate. He said 43 people were injured in the incident.
“The Russians knew it was a civilian facility. They could not have been unaware,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
“Each such Russian strike, each instance of Russian arrogance in response to global calls to end the war, all this only confirms that pressure is necessary.”
Separately, a missile strike on a hospital in the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region killed a 23-year-old pregnant woman and two others.
Zelenskiy earlier said a total of 22 people had been killed over the past 24 hours.
Russia, which denied targeting civilians in Tuesday’s attacks, has intensified airstrikes on Ukrainian towns and cities behind the front lines of its full-scale invasion, now in its fourth year, as it gradually pushes ahead on the battlefield. Russian forces hold around a fifth of Ukrainian territory.
TRUMP’S NEW, SHORTER DEADLINE
Trump, underscoring his frustration with Putin, said in Scotland on Monday he was shortening his earlier deadline of 50 days to 10 or 12 days for Russia to make progress towards ending the war.
On Tuesday, aboard Air Force One, he said he had heard no reply from Russia and could begin slapping tariffs and other measures on Moscow within 10 days.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday that it had “taken note” of Trump’s earlier statement. “The special military operation continues,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, employing the term that Moscow uses for its war effort in Ukraine.
Following Tuesday’s attack on the prison, across the Dnipro River from Russian-occupied territory, injured inmates waded through rubble and broken glass.
Bandaged and bloody, they sat stunned as guards yelled out a roll call.
Ukraine’s Justice Ministry said the prison’s dining hall had been destroyed and other parts of the facility damaged in a strike that involved four high-explosive bombs and also wounded 42 people.
It had originally said 17 people were killed, but later revised its tally.
“People were screaming, moaning,” said prisoner Yaroslav Samarskiy, 54, recalling the aftermath of the strike.
“Some dead, some alive, some without legs – half of them burned.”
Separately, five people were killed on Tuesday morning in the northeastern Kharkiv region after a Russian strike on a humanitarian aid point in a frontline village, a senior police official said.
(Reporting by Serhiy Chalyi in Zaporizhzhia and Dan Peleschuk in Kyiv; additional reporting by Dmitry Antonov in Moscow; editing by Sharon Singleton, Mark Heinrich, Ron Popeski, Rod Nickel)
