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At least one person was killed and 15 wounded in a Russian missile attack on a clinic in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
They denounced the attack as a crime against humanity, and Ukraine’s Defense Ministry called it a serious war crime under the Geneva Conventions, which describe how soldiers and civilians should be treated in war.
Video footage shows the damaged building with smoke billowing out. Much of the top floor of what appeared to be a three-story building was badly damaged, as were the cars parked nearby.
“Apart [Russian] missile attacks, other crimes against humanity,” Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter. “The building of a psychological clinic and a veterinary clinic in the city of Dnipro were destroyed. So far, one person has been killed and 15 injured.”
Russia has denied repeated accusations that its soldiers committed war crimes in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said earlier Friday that air defenses had shot down 10 missiles and more than 20 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack on the capital Kyiv, Dnipro and eastern regions.
Also, a Russian S-300 missile hit a dam in the Karlivka district of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province, putting nearby settlements at risk of severe flooding.
Reuters could not verify the report.
Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine 15 months ago, did not immediately comment on the reported airstrikes, but said Ukraine had struck two areas in southern Russia with rockets and drones.
Conflict could last ‘a decade’: Medvedev
Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now deputy chairman of the Kremlin’s security council, said Friday’s talks to end the war were impossible if Ukraine’s Western-backed Zelenskyy came to power.
“This conflict will last a long time. For several decades, probably. This is a new reality,” Medvedev was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency.
He said that Russia cannot rely on any ceasefire with the current Kyiv authorities because the conflict will only flare up again and therefore the nature of the current Ukrainian government must be destroyed.
Negotiations, Medvedev said, with “clown Zelenskyy” is impossible.
“Everything always ends in negotiations, and this is inevitable, but as long as these people are in power, the situation for Russia will not change in terms of negotiations.”
Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and many more seriously injured in the conflict, which began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was ousted in a popular Maidan uprising in Ukraine, Russia seized the Crimean peninsula and Russian-backed separatists seized swaths of eastern Ukraine.
Russia to keep nuclear in Belarus
Medvedev also warned that the West was greatly underestimating the risk of a nuclear war in Ukraine, warning that Russia would launch a pre-emptive strike if Ukraine acquired nuclear weapons.
Russia, which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, has repeatedly accused the West of waging a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine that could escalate into a larger conflict.
“There is an irrevocable law of war. When it comes to nuclear weapons, there must be a pre-emptive strike,” said Medvedev.
“Anglo-Saxons do not understand all this and believe that it will never happen,” he said. “It will be in certain circumstances.”
The West says it wants to help Ukraine win its conflict with Russia, and Western powers have provided Kyiv with modern weapons and ammunition. But US President Joe Biden has warned that a direct confrontation between the US-backed NATO alliance and Russia would lead to world war.
Russia says Washington will not allow it to support a country bordering the United States, and the Kremlin says the West is fighting an unrecognized war with Russia.
On Thursday, Russia continued its plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in its neighbor and close ally Belarus, marking a deal on the storage of warheads.
“The movement of nuclear weapons has begun,” Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko told reporters in Moscow, where he was attending talks with leaders of the former Soviet Union.
The US State Department denied the deployment plans, but said Washington had no intention of changing its position on strategic nuclear weapons and saw no signs that Russia was ready to use nuclear weapons.
“This is the latest example of irresponsible behavior we’ve seen from Russia,” said US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
It will be the Kremlin’s first bomb deployment outside of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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