A Russian guided bomb attack on the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia has killed at least 13 civilians and injured about 30 others, officials said.
Graphic footage posted on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Telegram page on Wednesday showed bloodied civilians lying in a city street being treated by emergency services.
“There is nothing more brutal than aerial bombing of a city, knowing that ordinary civilians will suffer,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.
High-rise residential blocks, an industrial facility and other infrastructure were damaged in the attack, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said on Telegram on Wednesday. The debris hit a tram and a bus with passengers inside, it added.
Regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said Russian forces launched guided bombs at a residential area in the city in the middle of the afternoon, and at least two residential buildings were struck in the attack.
Moscow has frequently launched aerial attacks on civilian infrastructure during its almost three-year war on Ukraine. It has consistently denied targeting civilians.
Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from Kharkiv in Ukraine, said that “strikes were aimed at what has been described as an ‘industrial site’.”
Hull described “scenes of devastation outside a factory, in a multi-storey apartment building opposite … in addition to a passing tram and minibus, which would have been carrying passengers.”
Marina Miron, a military analyst at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that “the plant had already been targeted in November, as the Russians say Ukrainians were using it to assemble drones”.
“Owing to the deaths of civilians, however, there is a possibility that Russian navigation systems were jammed,” said Miron.
The attack comes as both Russia and Ukraine seek to project strength before US President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Earlier in the day, the Ukrainian military said it had struck a fuel storage depot inside Russia, causing a huge blaze at a facility that supplies missiles to a Russian air base.
Ukraine’s General Staff said that the assault hit the storage facility near Engels, in Russia’s Saratov region, about 600km (373 miles) east of the Ukrainian border.
As Ukraine faces certain restrictions in using Western-supplied missiles, Kyiv has been developing its own long-range arsenal capable of reaching targets behind its front line.
The attacks have disrupted Russian logistics in the war, which began on February 24, 2022.
‘Serious security guarantees’
Earlier on Wednesday, Zelenskyy said that countries wanting to end the war should offer Ukraine assurances about its future defence.
“To be honest, I believe that we have a right to demand serious security guarantees from countries that aim for the peace in the world,” Zelenskyy said.
Ukraine’s leader was speaking at a news conference in Kyiv, responding to comments from US President-elect Donald Trump that he understood Russia’s opposition to neighbouring Ukraine joining NATO.
Speaking to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago estate in a wide-ranging media conference late on Tuesday, Trump said “Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feelings about that.”
The United States, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia have stood in the way of Ukraine immediately joining the 32-nation NATO alliance, Zelenskyy noted.
