Ukraine Says at Least 18 Civilians Are Killed in Strikes

The Ukrainian authorities said Sunday that two airstrikes a day earlier had killed at least 18 civilians, one of the highest single-day tolls so far this year and a grim reminder of the war’s enduring devastation as it approaches its fourth year.

The first strike occurred Saturday morning when a Russian missile hit a residential building in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, nearly 150 miles from the front lines, killing at least 14 people, including two children, according to local emergency services. Videos from the aftermath of the attack showed a section of the building reduced to rubble, with clothes and documents scattered across the area.

A few hours later, Ukrainian authorities said that a Russian bomb had smashed into a boarding school in Sudzha, a town in western Russia that is under Ukrainian control, killing four people.

The Russian Defense Ministry blamed Kyiv for the deadly strike in Sudzha and did not address the attack on Poltava. Neither side’s claims could be independently verified.

Ukrainian officials said that some 90 Russian civilians displaced by the nearby fighting had been sheltering in the school when the attack occurred. Oleksiy Dmytrashkivkyi, a military spokesman in the area, said in text messages that four of those people had been killed and 10 injured.

“They destroyed the building even though dozens of civilians were there,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Saturday night in a social media post, emphasizing that those were Russia’s “own civilians.” He shared images of the ruins and of people covered in dust, visibly shaken by the attack.

Sudzha, a small town near the Ukrainian border in Russia’s western Kursk region, was captured by Kyiv’s forces during a cross-border assault last summer and has since been occupied by Ukraine.

Saturday’s attacks — striking cities both near and far from the front lines and killing people from both warring nations — underscored the brutal toll of the war on civilians. Since Russia’s invasion began nearly three years ago, more than 12,300 civilians have been killed, a U.N. official reported just before Christmas.

The United Nations noted a sharp increase in casualties last year because of the use of long-range drones, missiles and glide bombs capable of reaching distant targets. Cities once considered relatively safe — like Lviv, in western Ukraine, and Poltava — now face frequent attacks. In Kyiv, the once-rare buzz of Russian drones flying overhead now echoes regularly through the night.

Denys Kliap, the director of Free and Unbreakable, a volunteer emergency response team in Poltava, said he and his colleagues rushed to the site of the attack as soon as they heard explosions, finding a pile of rubble and a residential building on fire. “I heard incredible screams from people,” he recalled. “People were moaning from under the rubble, shouting for help.”

As he moved closer to the building’s remains, Mr. Kliap, 26, came across the torn body of a woman in the rubble. Inside, a colleague found another woman with an open wound, bleeding heavily. Other residents were in a state of shock, he said.

Photographs from the emergency services showed that several floors of the building had collapsed. Some apartment rooms were left miraculously intact, their doors opening onto the void left by a neighboring collapsed apartment. Clothes dangled into the emptiness, suspended on steel bars and cables.

On Sunday morning, Ukrainian emergency services were still searching through the rubble left by the missile strike the day before. They said they had rescued 22 people. Mr. Kliap, speaking by phone from the site, said relatives of residents had gathered there, hoping for survivors.

“But the rescuers often only find dead bodies,” he said.

The strike in Poltava rekindled memories of a previous attack, in September, on a military academy that killed 50 people, many of them students. Russian missiles had hit the academy only minutes after air-raid alarms blared. “For the last year, the feeling of danger among citizens of Poltava has increased,” Mr. Kliap said.

Ukrainian authorities have urged their Western partners to supply more air-defense missiles and systems to protect Ukrainian cities. “We need better protection — air-defense systems, long-range weapons and sanctions pressure,” Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday, noting that just this past week, Russia had launched nearly 50 missiles, 660 attack drones and more than 760 glide bombs.

Russian civilians have also increasingly found themselves at risk as the battlefield has partly shifted over to Russia in areas like Kursk, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been fighting, and as Ukraine targets military bases and oil facilities within Russia.

Thousands of civilians were caught in the early days of the fighting, and many have remained in the Ukrainian-controlled area since. As Russian forces have gradually pushed forward with assaults to reclaim their land, the continuing battles have placed the civilians in great danger.

Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting.