Russian forces shelled a small metropolis in jap Ukraine twice in fast succession on Monday night, killing not less than 5 individuals, together with an emergency employee who was responding to the primary assault, Ukrainian officers stated.

At least 31 others, together with a toddler and greater than a dozen cops, have been injured within the assaults on the town, Pokrovsk, Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of inside affairs, stated on the Telegram messaging app. He praised the “heroes” who have been first to reach on the website to assist.

The Russian strikes hit the middle of Pokrovsk twice inside 40 minutes, stated the top of the Donetsk regional army administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko. The variety of victims might rise. Rescuers have been digging by means of the rubble of what he stated included broken residential buildings, retailers and eating places.

The particulars of the assaults in the mining city in the Donetsk region, which had a prewar population of about 50,000, couldn’t be independently verified. But Mr. Klymenko stated {that a} rescuer, Andrii Omelchenko, 52, was killed in the course of the second strike.

He stated that Mr. Omelchenko, a deputy chief of Ukraine’s State Emergency Service in Donetsk, “gave half of his life to service.”

Long earlier than the Ukrainian counteroffensive to reclaim Russian-occupied territory started, Donetsk and the broader Donbas area within the east have been the location of a few of the struggle’s most brutal combating. Several Ukrainian cities about an hour’s drive from Pokrovsk, together with Bakhmut and Avdiivka, have been all however obliterated.

Russia is aiming to go away “only broken and scorched stones” within the Donbas, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine stated on social media, the place he shared footage of broken buildings and of residents and emergency employees looking the rubble for victims. It was not clear who recorded the video, and The Times couldn’t independently confirm its particulars.

Mr. Zelensky acknowledged Mr. Omelchenko and different State Emergency Service employees by identify in his nightly handle, thanking them for saving Ukrainian lives.

Russian forces additionally struck twice in Ukraine’s jap Kharkiv area on Monday night, killing civilians and injuring those that got here to assist them, in keeping with Oleg Sinegubov, the top of the regional administration.

Two individuals have been killed and not less than 5 others injured after aerial bombs have been dropped on a village within the Kupiansk district, Mr. Sinegubov stated. Rescue employees then “came under repeated fire from the occupiers,” he stated. Two emergency service staff have been hospitalized, he added.