Ukraine reported that Dnipro airport was destroyed in a Russian attack

Ukrainian authorities reported on Sunday that Dnipro airport in the east-central part of the country has been destroyed in a Russian attack, the agencies Ukrinform and Unian reported.

The head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko, assured on his Telegram channel that “there is nothing left of the airport, destroyed along with the adjacent infrastructure”.

“The rockets are still flying”, said the person responsible while trying to clarify information about possible victims of the bombing.

The head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional council, Mykola Lukashuk, confirmed, for his part, that there were three hits on the airport compound, which also destroyed the nearby infrastructure.

He said that five employees of the State Emergency Situations Service were injured.

Lukashuk had previously reported that last night there were seven impacts in Dnipro.

On Sunday, the Russian Army confirmed the destruction of the headquarters of the Ukrainian battalion Dnepr, located in the Dnipropetrovsk region in the east of the country, and close to the airport, following a missile attack on Saturday night.

The airport had already been the target of another attack on 15 March that destroyed the runway and caused damage to a terminal building.

Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasilenko said that “all investments made in the airport”, which was completely renovated last year, “have been completely ruined”, as she reported on her Twitter account.

Dnipro is an industrial city of one million inhabitants crossed by the Dnieper River (Dnipro in Ukrainian), which marks the border of the eastern regions of the country.

Until now, it has been relatively little affected by the advance of Russian forces.

TRAIN ATTACK

At least 50 people were killed, including four children, and another 100 were injured this Friday in a rocket attack on the station in Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine, where hundreds of people were waiting for a train to leave the region.

“More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 were injured after a rocket fire at the station (...) This is a deliberate attack,” Oleksander Kamyshin, head of the Ukrainian railway company Ukrzaliznytsia, said in Telegram.

Moments later, the rescue services reported that there were at least 50 deaths.

More than a month after Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has shifted its focus to the eastern and southern parts of the country after heavy resistance torpedoed its plans for an easy capture of the capital, Kiev.

Instead, Russian troops seem to aim to create a long-sought land link between occupied Crimea and the Moscow-backed small separatist states of Donetsk and Lugansk in Donbas.

Heavy shelling has already begun to devastate cities in the region, and authorities have called on civilians to flee, but the intensity of the fighting prevents evacuations.

In Donetsk, the head of the regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said that three evacuation trains had been temporarily blocked after a Russian airstrike on an overpass next to a station.

But officials continued to pressure civilians to leave where possible.

“There is no secret: the battle for Donbas will be decisive. What we have already experienced, all this horror, can multiply,” warned the governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiy Gaiday.

“Go away! The next few days are the last opportunities. The buses will be waiting for you in the morning,” he added.

(with information from EFE, EP and AFP)

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