ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (Reuters) -Russian air strikes on southeastern Ukraine killed at least 19 people overnight, officials said on Tuesday, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would shorten a deadline for Russian President Vladimir Putin to make peace.
Sixteen people were killed and dozens wounded when Russia bombed a prison in the front-line Zaporizhzhia region in an attack Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said was “deliberate”.
“The Russians could not have been unaware that they were targeting civilians in that facility,” he wrote on X. “And this was done after a completely clear position was voiced by the United States.”
Separately, a missile strike on a hospital in the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region killed a 23-year-old pregnant woman and two others, Zelenskiy added. He 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 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, underscoring his frustration with Putin, said on Monday he would give 10 or 12 days for Russia to make progress towards ending the war.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday that it had “taken note” of Trump’s statement. “The special military operation continues,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, employing the term that Moscow uses for its war effort in Ukraine.
‘SCREAMING, MOANING’
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 front-line 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 and Mark Heinrich)
