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A series of explosions in the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine sent towering lighting smoke into the sky and triggered a series of secondary explosions.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The blasts earlier Saturday came hours after Russia’s increasingly beleaguered incursion into Ukraine focused on attacks it had illegally annexed, and the death toll from an earlier missile strike on apartment buildings in the southern city of Zaporozhye. rose to 14 people.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram that the early morning explosion was the result of missile strikes on a medical facility, a non-residential building and other locations in the city.
To condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin and his actions against the worst armed conflict in Europe since World War II, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to human rights groups in his country and Ukraine, as well as a man arrested in Russia’s ally Belarus. Imprisoned activists.
Commission chairman Berritt Rice-Anderson said the honor went to “three outstanding defenders of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence.”
Putin this week illegally claimed four regions of Ukraine as Russian territory, including the Zaporozhye region, home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, where reactors were shut down last month.
Fighting near the Russian-occupied Zaporozhye nuclear power plant alarmed the United Nations atomic energy watchdog, which on Friday doubled the number of inspectors overseeing safeguards at the plant to four.
An accident there could have released 10 times as much potentially deadly radiation than the world’s worst nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, 36 years ago, Ukraine’s environmental protection minister Ruslan Stryles said on Friday.
“The occupation, shelling and exploitation of the Chernobyl and Zaporozhye nuclear power plants by Russian forces are having global consequences,” Stryitz told The Associated Press.
UN watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency reported more trouble at the plant, tweeting on Friday that external power was again cut to a shutdown reactor in Zaporozhye, requiring emergency backup diesel generators to ensure safety Run the system.
The city of Zaporozhye, 53 kilometers (33 miles) from the nuclear power plant, flies over by crows, and remains under Ukrainian control.
Russian troops bombed the city with S-300 missiles on Thursday in an effort to cement Russia’s sovereignty over the region, and more attacks were reported on Friday.
The death toll from Friday’s attack on an apartment building rose to 14, Ukrainian authorities said, while 12 people injured in the bombing remained in hospital.
Missiles also hit the city overnight, injuring one person, Zaporozhye governor Oleksandr Starukh said.
Russia also used an Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone there for the first time and damaged two infrastructure, he said.
As its forces are captured by Ukraine in counteroffensives in the south and east, Russia has deployed unmanned, one-off Iranian-made drones that are cheaper and simpler than missiles but still capable of destroying ground targets .
The Washington-based Institute for War Research said Russia’s use of explosive-laden drones was unlikely to affect the course of the war.
“They used many drones in the rear against civilian targets, possibly hoping to create a nonlinear effect through terror. Such efforts were unsuccessful,” analysts at the think tank wrote.
In other areas annexed by Moscow, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on Friday that its forces had repelled a Ukrainian offensive near the city of Leman and recaptured three villages elsewhere in eastern Donetsk.
The ministry also claimed that Russian troops blocked the advance of Ukrainian troops towards several villages in the southern Kherson region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a nightly video address on Friday that this week alone, his forces have recaptured 776 square kilometers (300 square miles) of territory and 29 settlements in the east, including Lulu, annexed by Putin. 6 settlements in the Gansk region. .
In total, Ukrainian forces have liberated 2,434 square kilometers (940 square miles) of land and 96 settlements since the start of the counteroffensive, he said.
In Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian troops shelled the city of Nikopol overnight, killing one person, injuring another and damaging buildings, gas pipelines and power systems.
Nikopol is located along the Dnieper River, opposite Russian-controlled territory and close to a nuclear power plant.
The city has been shelled regularly for weeks.
The signs of destruction and death in areas where Russian troops were withdrawing became clearer on Friday.
Since September 7, 530 civilian bodies have been found in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine, according to a report by the First Deputy Minister of the Interior of Ukraine, Yevn Yenin.
Ye Nin said the residents killed during the Russian occupation included 257 men, 225 women and 19 children, 29 of whom were unidentified.
Most of the bodies were found in a previously disclosed mass grave in the city of Izium.
According to Ye Ning, the bodies found showed signs of shooting, explosions and torture.
Some had ropes wrapped around their necks, hands tied behind their backs, bullet wounds to their knees and broken ribs.
Authorities have identified 22 torture sites in parts of the Kharkiv region recently liberated by the Ukrainian army, regional police official Shershi Bolvinov said.
Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kirilenko reported on Telegram that in the recently recaptured Lehman, workers found 200 separate graves and a mass grave with an unknown number of victims.
In Sviatohirsk, 24 kilometers (15 miles) from Leman, the bodies of 21 civilians were reburied.
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