At least 27 dead in shelling of market in Russian-occupied Ukraine, officials report

At least 27 people were killed on Sunday by shelling at a market on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk in Russian-occupied Ukraine, local officials reported.

A further 25 people were injured in the strike on the suburb of Tekstilshchik, including two children, said Denis Pushilin, head of the Russian-installed authorities in Donetsk. He said that the shells had been fired by the Ukrainian military.

According to Alexei Kulemzin, the city’s Russian-installed mayor, Ukrainian forces bombarded a busy area with shops and a market. Pushilin said the city was shelled by Ukrainian artillery. There was no immediate Ukrainian comment.

Pushilin said that the area had been hit by 155mm calibre and 152mm calibre artillery, and that the shells had been fired from the direction of Kurakhove and Krasnohorivka to the west. He also confirmed that emergency services continued to work at the scene.

Reuters photographs and video taken at the scene showed crying people, some of whom said they had lost relatives, and bodies lying on blood-soaked snow near one of the city’s markets.

Pushilin announced a day of mourning on Monday in the Donetsk People’s Republic, the name given to the part of the region Russia says it has annexed.

He said emergency services were working at the scene and forensic specialists were trying to collect fragments of the weapons used in the attack.

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In a statement, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the strike as a “terrorist attack”.

“These terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime clearly demonstrate its lack of political will towards achieving peace and the settlement of this conflict by diplomatic means,” it said.

In Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry called the attack “a barbaric act of terrorism” by Ukraine that was carried out “with the use of weapons supplied by the West”.

“The Russian side categorically condemns this treacherous strike against the civilian population,” a ministry statement said.

The governor of the Ukrainian-controlled part of the region, Vadym Filashkin, said Russian attacks killed at least two people at two locations east of the city of Donetsk on Sunday.

At Kurakhove, about 45km (28 miles) west of Donetsk, shelling killed a 31-year-old man and injured another person, while a 62-year-old man was killed and a 70-year-old man injured at Krasnohorivka between Donetsk and Kurakhove, Filashkin said.

“I call on everyone who remains in Donetsk: evacuate!” Filashkin said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

Local media reported that the port 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, 165km southwest of St Petersburg.

In a press statement to Russian media outlet RBC, the company said the fire was the result of an “external influence”. It also said it had paused operations at the port.

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Yuri Zapalatsky, the head of Russia’s Kingisepp district, where the port is based, said in a statement that there were no casualties, but that the area had been placed on high alert.

News outlet Fontanka reported that two drones had been detected flying towards St Petersburg Sunday morning, but that they were redirected towards the Kingisepp district. The Associated Press could not independently verify the reports.

The Russian Ministry of Defence did not report any drone activity in the Kingisepp area in its daily briefing. It said that four Ukrainian drones had been downed in Russia’s Smolensk region, and that two more had been shot down in the Oryol and Tula regions.

Russian officials previously confirmed that a Ukrainian drone had been downed on the outskirts of St Petersburg on Thursday.

In the fighting on the front line, Russia’s Ministry of Defence announced on Sunday that Moscow’s forces had taken control of the village of Krokhmalne in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

Ukrainian forces confirmed that the settlement had been occupied, but described its capture as a “temporary phenomenon.”

Volodymyr Fityo, spokesperson for Ukrainian Ground Forces Command, said that Kyiv’s troops had been pulled back to pre-prepared reserve positions.

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Russian and Ukrainian forces have continued to fight from largely static positions along the roughly 1,500-km (930-mile) front line throughout the winter.

Recent Russian attacks have tried to find gaps in Ukraine’s defences by using large numbers of various types of missiles in an apparent effort to saturate air defence systems.

The massive barrages – more than 500 drones and missiles were fired between December 29 and January 2, according to officials in Kyiv – are also using up Ukraine’s weapons stockpiles.

Additional reporting by Reuters