Five dead in Ukrainian attacks in Russian-controlled east

Five people were killed in Ukrainian artillery attacks on Friday in the Russian-occupied areas in the east of the Donetsk region, authorities based in Moscow said.

The Kremlin often accuses Kyiv of indiscriminate attacks on civilians. Ukraine denies these allegations and says it only bombs military targets responsible for deadly attacks on its own civilian population.

“Five people were killed,” Denis Pushilin, a senior Russian official in the occupied Donetsk region, said on social media, adding that three others were injured.

“In the morning mass attack on the village of Staromykhailivka in the Kirov region of Donetsk, women born in 1948 and 1988 and a man born in 1989 were killed,” Pushilin said.

He said an attack in the village of Luganske killed a woman born in 1961, and in the village of Aleksandrovka a woman born in 1963 was killed.

He said that 11 residential buildings in the Kirov district of Donetsk region were damaged in an attack.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has already lasted more than two years.