Eleven people were killed on January 6 when Russian forces shelled the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, the governor of the Ukrainian-controlled part of the region said.
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Vadym Filashkin said five children were among those killed in the missile strike on Pokrovsk, a city in Ukrainian-held territory about 80 kilometers northwest of Donetsk city, which lies in the Russian held center of the region.
"The Russians hit the region with S-300 missiles, killing 11 people and wounding another eight," Filashkin said on Telegram. The main strike hit Pokrovsk and nearby villages, he said, adding that the attack showed Russian forces were "trying to inflict as much grief as possible on our land."
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy responded in his nightly video address, saying Russia must be made to feel the consequences of every such attack.
"The Russian strike targeted ordinary residential buildings and private houses," Zelenskiy said. "Russia must feel -- always feel -- that no such strike will go without consequences for the terrorist state."
Reports of the deaths in Pokrovsk came after the Ukrainian Air Force said it had destroyed a Russian command center at the Saky air base on the occupied Crimean Peninsula in an overnight attack.
“All targets have been shot down,” Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk wrote on Telegram, adding that Russia lost “another command post in Crimea.”
Ukraine on January 5 said it carried out separate strikes on a Russian military command post and a military unit in Crimea, inflicting "serious damage" to Russia's defense system.
Natalya Humenyuk, the spokeswoman for the Defense Forces of Southern Ukraine, said that "really powerful combat" operations took place earlier this week, hitting Russia's military operations in Crimea especially hard.
"Not only one command post was affected," she said in a rare detailing of Ukrainian operations.
Russia on January 6 claimed that its forces shot down four Ukrainian missiles in Crimea overnight.
The reports cannot be independently verified.
Since Moscow's brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine’s forces have conducted frequent strikes on Russian military targets in Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
The Saky airfield made headlines in September 2023 when Ukraine said its military hit the facility, causing “serious damage" to equipment at the site. Crimea’s Moscow-installed officials denied the claim.
The air base had also come under a Ukrainian strike in August the previous year, with Kyiv claiming that the attack destroyed at least nine military aircraft, including Su-30SM fighters and Su-24M bombers.
Both the Ukraine and Russia have escalated attacks in recent days, as the military conflict drags on into nearly two years.
In Moscow, a top Russian official was quoted as saying that Russia plans to produce 32,500 drones each year by 2030, allocating $7.66 billion for the project.
"This is almost three times higher than current production volumes,” First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov was quoted as saying by the TASS news agency on January 6.
Drones have been widely used both by Moscow and Kyiv since the war began. Russia mostly relies on the cheaply produced, Iranian-made Shahed drones in its aerial assaults on Ukrainian infrastructure far beyond the front lines in the east and south of the country.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has intensively used the first-person-view (FVP) drones -- small drones originally meant for personal civilian use but modified for the battlefield.
Kyiv said last month that it planned to produce more than 11,000 medium- and long-range attack drones, as well as 1 million FPV drones in 2024.
With reporting by AFP, dpa, and Reuters
This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.