A day after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appeared to warn of more attacks inside Russia, two Russian missiles slammed into a residential building and university complex in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Monday, killing at least four people and injuring nearly three dozen others, Ukrainian officials said.
The unusually pointed warning from Ukraine’s leader followed a series of apparent Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory, suggesting that Kyiv would try to match Russia’s tactic of striking far from the front lines. But Russia’s weapons have proved far deadlier for civilians, as they were again on Monday in Kryvyi Rih, Mr. Zelensky’s steel-producing hometown.
“Unfortunately, there are dead and wounded,” Mr. Zelensky said in a statement on the Telegram app shortly after the attack in Kryvyi Rih. He posted video from the scene that showed smoke pouring out of a building that had a gaping hole where several upper floors had been.
As rescue workers continued to search for people believed to be trapped under the rubble, the State Emergency Service said that at least four people had been killed and 33 injured in the strikes. Yurii Ihnat, the Ukrainian Air Force’s spokesman, said that Russia had likely used ballistic missiles in the attack.
Last month, a Russian strike killed at least 11 people in Kryvyi Rih, which is about 100 miles from the front line in Ukraine’s east.
Russian forces also shelled 130 towns and villages along the front line, with some of the most intense fire directed at the southern port city of Kherson on the west bank of the Dnipro River, Ukrainian officials said on Monday. At least one person was killed after Russia hit the city center with rockets, said Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the regional military administration.
Natalia Humeniuk, the spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s southern command, said on national television that Russia was trying to escalate its attacks on the western bank of the river despite shortages of munitions, saying, “they still lack shells.”
Ms. Humeniuk said that Ukrainian strikes on key Russian logistical routes — particularly on the bridges and roads linking the occupied Crimean peninsula to southern Ukraine and to Russia — were making it difficult for Moscow to resupply and redeploy its occupation forces.
The attack on Kryvyi Rih came as Kyiv promised to bring the war closer to Russians, largely abandoning a policy of strategic ambiguity regarding attacks inside Russia that it had maintained for much of the war.
Mr. Zelensky’s comments in his nightly address on Sunday evening, after two drones hit buildings in the heart of the Russian capital, were the clearest sign yet that Ukraine sees such strikes as a key tactic in the war.
“Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centers and military bases,” he said. “And this is an inevitable, natural, and absolutely fair process.”
