Russian attack on Ukraine’s Kharkiv kills at least four, injures dozens 

A Russian attack on the the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv has killed at least six people, including a 14-year-old girl, and wounded dozens of others, Ukrainian officials have said.

“Occupiers killed a child right on the playground,” Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Friday.

Three other people were killed in a 12-storey apartment block that caught fire as a result of the attack, he said.

“Unfortunately, the death toll has risen to six people,” Kharkiv regional Governor Oleg Synegubov said in a post on Telegram hours after the attack.

A 14-year-old girl was among those killed, Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said.

At least 55 people were wounded, he said.

A video from the site shared by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak, showed huge flames and heavy black smoke rising from the upper floors of a residential building.

“Russians hit civilians again,” Yermak said on Telegram.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and the surrounding region have long been targeted by Russian attacks, in particular, by highly destructive guided bombs.

Moscow’s forces attempted to capture Kharkiv in the early stages of their invasion but were pushed back. They launched a new ground offensive in the Kharkiv region in May.

“We need strong decisions from our partners to stop this terror,” Zelenskyy said in a post on social media.

“We need long-range capabilities,” he added, referring to Kyiv’s appeals to allies to lift restrictions on the use of Western-supplied missiles inside Russian territory.

“We need the implementation of air defence agreements for Ukraine. This is about saving lives,” he added.

Earlier, Russian raids in the region of Sumy, which neighbours Kharkiv, left at least two people dead and eight wounded, local authorities said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly said that its forces do not target civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.

Earlier on Friday, Russia said that its forces had captured three more villages in eastern Ukraine, where it is advancing even as Kyiv mounts a major cross-border assault into Russian territory.

In a briefing published on its Telegram page, Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had seized settlements in Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions.

Moscow appears to be focusing its firepower on the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk, where Kyiv says the fighting is intense and “difficult.”

“The most difficult situation remains in the Pokrovsk direction. The enemy is trying to break through the defences of our troops,” Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii said on Friday.

He also said Kyiv’s troops were continuing to press forward in Russia’s western Kursk region, where they claimed earlier this week to have taken control of 100 border settlements.

Meanwhile, European Union defence ministers have agreed the bloc’s training of Ukrainian forces should take place as close as possible to the war-torn country but not on Ukrainian territory, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Friday.

Speaking after a meeting of the ministers in Brussels, Borrell also said they had agreed the EU’s training mission should aim to train 75,000 Ukrainian troops by the end of the year – having trained 60,000 up until now.

Several EU countries, including Estonia, France and Sweden, support training soldiers in Ukraine, but other countries, including Hungary, fear such a move could lead to conflict escalation.