Ukraine war briefing: Zelensky reiterates his plea for more weapons after Russian attack near Zaporizhia kills seven people | Ukraine

Russian forces fired missiles at the town of Vilniansk outside the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia on Saturday, killing seven people and wounding 31 others, officials said.President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated his call for allies to provide Ukraine with more long-range weapons and improved air defenses to stop what he said were daily attacks on his country. Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said two missiles were fired at the city in southeastern Ukraine, damaging infrastructure, a shop and residential buildings. Emergency services put the death toll at seven, including two children, and said eight of the 31 injured were also children. Firefighters had extinguished fires in several buildings and completed rescue operations.

The governor of the Zaporizhia region, Ivan Fedorov, described the attack in Vilniansk as “another terrible terrorist attack against the civilian population”.. It happened “in the middle of the day, on a non-working day, in the city center, where people were outside, relaxing, where there were no military targets,” he said in a video posted on Telegram. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Telegram that its missiles hit a nearby area in the Zaporizhia region where Ukrainian trains were dumping weapons and military equipment, killing soldiers and destroying armored vehicles and missiles. Neither side’s accounts of the fighting could be independently verified.

Four people were killed in Russian attacks on frontline villages in the eastern Donetsk region, Ukrainian officials saidThree of the inmates were in the village of Zarichne, the head of the region, Vadym Filashkin, said on social media. Another person, a resident of the frontline village of New York, “also suffered fatal injuries,” the Ukrainian Prosecutor General later said.

Ukrainian forces shelled parts of the Kursk region in southern Russia throughout Saturday after carrying out a drone strike on a village overnight that killed five people.including two children, the regional governor said. Alexei Smirnov posted on Telegram that the five fatalities had died in a house in the village of Gorodishche, east of the regional capital Kursk. Two family members were being treated in hospital. A video on Smirnov’s Telegram channel showed him in a destroyed house amid rubble and construction materials.

Ukraine and Russia said priests were among the dozens of captured soldiers and civilians they exchanged earlier this week.. Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that two Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests captured in Moscow-occupied Berdyansk had been returned to Ukraine thanks to the Vatican’s mediation. Russia said a senior Ukrainian Orthodox cleric had been handed over to Moscow along with two other priests. Moscow and Kyiv each exchanged 90 prisoners of war and some civilians earlier this week.

Rescue workers in Dnipro said several residents remained missing after at least one person was killed and 12 injuredincluding a seven-month-old girl, after a Russian attack destroyed the top four floors of the apartment block in central Ukraine on Friday evening.