Moscow-installed officials said Ukrainian shelling killed at least 27 people and wounded 20 on Sunday at a market on the outskirts of Donetsk, a Russian-occupied city in the eastern part of the country. Among the injured in the suburb of Tekstilshchik were two children, said Denis Pushilin, the local leader. Ukrainian officials in Kyiv did not comment, and the claims could not be independently verified by the AP or the New York Times. Both sides in the fighting have increasingly relied on longer-range attacks this winter in the face of largely unchanged positions on the 930-mile front line in the nearly two-year-old war.
The artillery shells that hit the area had been fired from the area of Kurakhove and Krasnohorivka to the west, Pushilin said, adding that emergency services responded to the scene. Donetsk is one of four regions in Ukraine that Russia annexed illegally in 2022, months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion. Russia's Foreign Ministry also blamed Ukraine and described the strike as a "terrorist attack," per the AP. On Telegram, Aleksei Kulemzin, the pro-Russian mayor of Donetsk, said the market "was attacked on Sunday, when it is busiest," per the Times.
Also on Sunday, a fire broke out at a chemical transport terminal at Russia's Ust-Luga port following two explosions, regional officials said. Local media said the Baltic Sea port, about 100 miles southwest of St. Petersburg, had been attacked by Ukrainian drones, causing a gas tank to explode. The blaze was at a site run by Russia's second-largest natural gas producer, Novatek, per the AP. In a statement to Russian media outlet RBC, the company blamed the fire on an "external influence," saying operations at the port were paused. Yuri Zapalatsky, the head of the Kingisepp district on the Gulf of Finland where the port is located, said that there were no casualties but that the area was on high alert.
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