Twenty-four people have been killed and 19 injured in a Russian air strike on a village in eastern Ukraine, local officials say.
The victims were “ordinary civilians” collecting their pensions in Yarova, Donetsk region, said President Volodymyr Zelensky. Regional head Vadym Filashkin said emergency services were working at the scene, urging residents to “evacuate to safer regions”.
Yarova is to the north of Slovyansk, one of the big cities in the region, and only a few kilometres from the front line as Russian forces advance slowly in the east.
If confirmed, the death toll would be among the heaviest attacks on Ukrainian civilians in recent weeks, 42 months into Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Twenty-three people were killed in overnight air strikes on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv at the end of August.
At the weekend Russia launched its biggest air assault of the war on Kyiv so far, hitting the main government building in the capital, in what Zelensky said was a “ruthless” attack aimed at prolonging the war.
Posting graphic footage of the attack on Yarova online, Zelensky said there were “no words” to describe the latest Russian strikes. There was no immediate response from Russia’s military.
The head of the local administration in the nearby city of Lyman, Oleksandr Zhuravlyov, told Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne that the attack took place at about 10:40 local time (07:40 GMT) on Tuesday, as pensions were being handed out.
He said most of the victims were elderly people.
Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko later said Russia “dropped a guided air bomb” on the village.
Pictures from the scene showed a badly damaged Ukrainian postal service vehicle of the type used to distribute pensions.
The head of the Ukrposhta service said the vehicle had been parked under trees as a security measure and a local postal official had been wounded in the attack. “Maybe someone gave away the co-ordinates,” he speculated.
Yarova sits on a key railway line between the cities of Lyman and Izium. It is also only about 6km (3.7 miles) away from the next village of Novoselivka, where Russian forces are closing in on the outskirts.
Zhuravlyov told Suspilne they had to work out how the postal service could continue to hand out pensions: “Because the front line is less than 10km away, we will ‘move away’ all these payments, so they can have their pensions in safer places.”
Local officials said 22 people had already been evacuated from the area.
Ukraine’s state emergency service DSNS said another three people had been killed in earlier Russian shelling of settlements in Donetsk.
“The world must not remain silent,” Zelensky said, calling for a response from both the US, Europe and the G20 group of nations.
