The bodies of 44 civilians have been found in the rubble of a building destroyed by Russia, a Ukrainian official said. It comes as Ukraine’s vital Black Sea port of Odesa is repeatedly bombed, including by hypersonic missiles. The civilians were inside a five-storey building that collapsed in Izyum in the Kharkiv region in March, said Oleh Synehuboy, the head of Kharkiv’s regional administration. “This is another horrible war crime of the Russian occupiers against the civilian population,” he said. Izyum is an eastern Ukrainian city that Russia has been holding as a key frontline node. Mr Synehubov did not say specifically where the building was. Earlier, the Ukrainian military said Russian forces fired seven missiles from the air at Odesa, hitting a shopping centre and a warehouse. As part of the barrage, a Russian supersonic bomber fired three hypersonic missiles, according to the Centre for Defence Strategies, a Ukrainian think tank tracking the war.
The centre identified the weapons used as Kinzhal, or “Dagger”, hypersonic air-to-surface missiles.
The Kinzhal can fly at five times the speed of sound and has a range of 1,240 miles. Using advanced guided missiles allows Russia to fire from aircraft at a distance without being in Ukrainian air space and exposed to potential anti-aircraft fire. But Ukrainian, British and American officials warn Russia is rapidly expending its stock of precision weapons and may not be able to quickly build more, raising the risk of more imprecise rockets being used as the conflict grinds on. That could result in more civilian deaths and other collateral damage. Ukraine alleged at least some of the munitions used dated back to the Soviet era, making them unreliable in targeting. The strikes came after Russian President Vladimir Putin marked his country’s biggest patriotic holiday without being able to boast of major new battlefield successes. He watched troops march in formation and military hardware roll by in a Victory Day parade on Moscow’s Red Square in a celebration of the Soviet Union’s role in the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany. Many Western analysts had expected Mr Putin to use the Victory Day holiday to trumpet some kind of victory in Ukraine or announce an escalation, but he did neither. Instead, he sought to again justify the war as a necessary response to what he portrayed as a hostile Ukraine. Mr Putin has long bristled at Nato’s creep eastwards into former Soviet republics. Ukraine and its western allies have denied the country posed any threat. “The danger was rising by the day,” Mr Putin said. “Russia has given a pre-emptive response to aggression. It was forced, timely, and the only correct decision.” Intense fighting also raged in Ukraine’s east, and Russian forces sought to end the resistance of Ukrainian defenders making their last stand at a steel plant in Mariupol.