Ukrainian authorities across the country reported new Russian missile strikes and shelling that killed at least 16 more civilians.
The deaths came after top Russian military officials announced they were stepping up their attack on its neighbour.
Russian officials said Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu gave “instructions to further intensify the actions of units in all operational areas, in order to exclude the possibility of the Kyiv regime launching massive rocket strikes and artillery on civilian infrastructure and residents of settlements in Donbas and other regions.”
The new Russian attacks hit areas in the north, east and south of Ukraine.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, has seen particularly heavy shelling in recent days, with Ukrainian officials and local commanders fearing a second large-scale Russian assault on the northern city is looming.
At least three civilians were killed and three others injured in a pre-dawn Russian rocket strike on Saturday on the town of Chuhuiv in northern Ukraine, close to Kharkiv and just 75 miles from the Russian border, said a regional police chief.
Serhiy Bolvinov, deputy chief of the Kharkiv regional police, said the rockets were partially destroyed
a two-storey building.
“Four Russian rockets, presumably fired from the vicinity of (the Russian city of) Belgorod overnight, around 3:30 a.m., hit a residential building, a school and administrative buildings,” Bolvinov wrote on Facebook.
“The bodies of three people were found under the rubble. Three others were injured. The victims are civilians,” he added.
In the neighboring Sumy region, one civilian was killed and at least seven others injured after the Russians opened mortar and artillery fire on three towns and villages not far from the Russian border, regional governor Dmytro said. Zhyvytsky on Telegram.
In the besieged eastern region of Donetsk, seven civilians have been killed and 14 injured in the past 24 hours in attacks on towns, its governor announced on Saturday morning.
Nearby, however, Ukrainian troops repelled a Russian night assault on a strategic eastern highway, said Serhiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region.
Mr Haidai said Russia had been trying to seize the main road link between the towns of Lysychansk and Bakhmut “for more than two months”.
“They still can’t control several kilometers of this road,” Haidai wrote in a Telegram post.
Russia’s military campaign has focused on Donbass, which includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but Russian forces have also pounded other parts of the country in a relentless push to wrest territory from Ukraine and crush the morale of its leaders, troops and civilians.
In southern Ukraine, two people were injured by Russian shelling in the town of Bashtanka, northeast of the Black Sea city of Mykolaiv, according to regional governor Vitaliy Kim.
Mr Kim said Mykolaiv itself also came under fresh Russian fire before dawn. On Friday, he posted videos of what he called a Russian missile attack on the city’s two largest universities, and denounced Russia as “a terrorist state”.
Two people were killed and a woman was hospitalized after a Russian rocket strike on the riverside town of Nikopol, emergency services said.
Dnipropetrovsk Governor Valentyn Reznichenko said on Telegram that a five-story building, a school and a vocational school building were damaged.
On Friday, cruise missiles fired by Russian strategic bombers struck the city of Dnipro in southeastern Ukraine, killing at least three people and injuring 16, Ukrainian officials said.
At a regular press briefing on Saturday, Russian defense officials said the strike destroyed “workshops for the production and repair of Tochka-U ballistic missiles, as well as multiple rocket launchers.”
Spokesman Igor Konashenkov did not respond to Ukrainian claims that the strike killed civilians.
This week’s deadliest Russian attack came on Thursday, when a Russian missile strike killed at least 23 people – including three children – and injured more than 200 in Vinnytsia, a town southwest of Kyiv, the capital, far from the front lines. .
Russia said the Kalibr cruise missiles hit a “military facility” that was hosting a meeting between the Ukrainian air force command and foreign arms suppliers. Ukrainian authorities insisted the site had nothing to do with the military.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said Friday that Russian forces carried out more than 17,000 strikes against civilian targets during the war, killing thousands of combatants and civilians and driving millions from their homes.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also impacted the global economy, driving up energy and food prices and curbing exports of key Ukrainian and Russian products such as grain, fuel and fertilizers.
