(Reuters) – Russia launched another wave of overnight attacks on the Black Sea port of Odesa early on Sunday, killing one and injuring 18 people including four children, and damaging residential and religious infrastructure, Ukraine’s officials said.
“Odesa: another night attack of the monsters,” said Oleh Kiper, governor of the broader southern Ukraine’s Odesa region of which the city of Odesa is an administrative centre, on the Telegram messaging app.
“Unfortunately, we have one civilian who was killed.”
Kiper earlier said that according to preliminary information, 14 people were hospitalised, including three children.
Russia has been pounding Odesa and other Ukrainian food export facilities nearly daily over the past week after Moscow withdrew from a United Nations-brokered sea corridor agreement that allowed for the safe shipment of Ukrainian grain.
Ukraine’s Air Force said on its Telegram messaging app that Russia launched high-precision Onyx missiles and sea-to-shore Kalibr cruise missiles on Odesa after midnight on Sunday. The scale of the attack was not immediately known.
The RBC-Ukraine news agency reported that the city’s largest Orthodox church, the Spaso-Preobrazhenskyi Cathedral consecrated in 1809, had been severely damaged in the attacks.
Social media videos showed rubble inside a dark church-like structure lit up by a fire and a distressed man walking and repeating, “The church is no longer.”
Reuters could not immediately independently verify the video or the reports of potential damage. Russia had no immediate comment on the attacks.
Moscow had described the attacks as revenge for a Ukrainian strike on a Russian-built bridge to Crimea – the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula seized by Moscow in 2014. It has accused Ukraine of using the sea corridor to launch “terrorist attacks.”
(Reporting by Gleb Garanich and Valentyn Ogirenko in Kyiv and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Writign by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Paul Simao and Richard Chang)
