KYIV: Russia claimed on Tuesday it had struck a command post in the eastern Ukraine town of Pokrovsk, as Kyiv said the missile attack had hit civilian targets and killed at least seven people.

Pokrovsk, which had a pre-war population of around 60,000, sits just 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the eastern front line, where Moscow says it is gaining ground and repelling Ukrainian attacks.

Two missiles — launched 40 minutes apart — damaged residential buildings, a hotel, cafes, shops and administrative buildings on Monday evening, Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk region’s military administration said.

This news agency’s correspondents on the ground saw rescuers evacuating survivors from the rubble of a five-storey block and carrying the wounded into ambulances. Seven people were killed in the strike and 82 were wounded, including two children, the emergency services said on Tuesday afternoon, announcing the rescue operations were over.

Those killed included a high-ranking emergency official of the Donetsk region, said Igor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs.

“We are resuming the demolition of rubble,” Klymenko said early on Tuesday, after the rescuers “were forced to suspend work for the night due to the high threat of repeated shelling”. The target of the missile attack was a command post of the Ukrainian armed forces, the Russian defence ministry said.

“Near the settlement of Krasnoarmeysk in the Donetsk People’s Republic, an advanced command post of the Khortytsya joint group of Ukrainian troops was hit,” it said, using the Russian name for Pokrovsk.

The Russian claim was an “absolute lie”, Sergiy Cherevaty, the spokesman for Ukraine’s operational command “east”, a level above the “Khortytsya” group, said.

Published in Dawn, August 9th, 2023