Deadly explosion hits market in Russian-controlled Ukrainian city, officials say
At least 25 people were killed on Sunday when artillery shells hit a market in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces, the region's pro-Moscow head said, blaming Ukrainian forces for the attack.
If confirmed, it would be one of the most serious incidents involving civilians in a Moscow-controlled area in recent months. Authorities in Ukraine did not immediately respond to a request for comment and it was not possible to independently confirm the strike.
Denis Pushilin, the pro-Moscow leader in the Russian-occupied part of the region, said on the messaging app Telegram that 20 people had also been injured at the market, which is located in the Kirovsky district and southwest of the city center. The area is located about 13 kilometers east of the front line in the war.
Donetsk's pro-Russian mayor Aleksei Kulemzin said on Telegram that the market “was attacked on Sunday, when it was at its busiest”, calling it “terrible”.
Russia annexed Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as two other regions of Ukraine, in the fall of 2022, about seven months after the large-scale invasion began. Ukraine and most international governments have condemned the annexations as illegal, but Moscow says Donetsk is now part of Russia's sovereign territory and the region's citizens are Russian.
As a result, Moscow presents any attack on civilians as an attack across a national border, which it says undermines Ukraine's claims over them.
Ukrainian authorities, on the other hand, say they are limiting their attacks to military targets in what they describe as the temporarily occupied territories to avoid hitting their own citizens.
Authorities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions organized referendums in 2022 and said the results showed a large majority of residents wanted to join Russia. But the votes were widely dismissed as a sham, and it is unclear what percentage of the population supports Moscow. At the same time, human rights groups accuse pro-Moscow authorities of detaining and torturing people they suspect of resisting Russian rule.
About 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia began its full-scale invasion about two years ago, and about 18,000 have been injured. according to United Nations data. A large majority of the casualties occurred in shelling and other attacks. In one incident in October in a village in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, 52 people were killed when a rocket hit a cafe where a wake was being held. Ukraine considers these attacks to be war crimes.
Sunday's market explosion comes at an uncertain time in the Donetsk region. Russia, which has effectively controlled the city of Donetsk since 2014, repelled a counter-offensive in the region last year that targeted the city of Bakhmut and aimed at recapturing other territory in the south and east of the country.
In the fall, Russia stepped up its own offensive around the towns of Marinka and Avdiivka, which are close to Donetsk's western suburbs.
The Ukrainian army said in recent weeks that it had all but withdrawn its troops from Marinka, a city that, like Avdiivka, is in ruins after months of shelling.
While this handed the Kremlin a victory, progress towards the overall goal in eastern Ukraine of seizing control of the entire Donetsk and Luhansk regions, collectively known as the Donbas, has been slow. Military analysts say that despite heavy fighting and significant losses on both sides, a Russian breakthrough appears unlikely any time soon.