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At least three people have been killed in Russian assaults that targeted Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions, officials said on August 7, describing the situation at the front line as “extremely difficult and tense.”
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Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram that a woman was killed and a man sustained head injuries when Russian shelling hit a residential area in the central part of the city. The shelling began around the midnight, officials said.
At least two rescue workers suffered heatstroke as they tried to evacuate residents and put out a fire at a nine-story building that was hit by the latest Russian strikes. (Video below.)
Ukrainian forces recaptured Kherson and parts of Kherson Province in the country’s south in November, several months after they were occupied by Russia.
But Russian troops continue to shell the city and surrounding areas from across the Dnieper River. A doctor was killed and a nurse was wounded in Russian shelling of a Kherson hospital earlier this month.
Two people were reported killed when Russian troops hit the border areas of the northeastern Kharkiv region on August 7, officials said. No further details were immediately available.
Russian forces targeted the Dnipropetrovsk region overnight, using rockets and heavy artillery, regional officials said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Emergency workers put out a fire that broke out in the aftermath of a missile strike in the Synelnyk district, said Serhiy Lysak, the head of the regional military administration.
Russian assaults continued in the morning, with the Myryvsk area coming under heavy artillery shelling, Lysak added.
New air-raid alerts went off around noon on August 7 in at least nine provinces, including Sumy, Poltava, and Zaporizhzhya, alerting residents to the danger of new Russian strikes.
According to Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces, about 50 combat clashes took place across the country over the past day.
Kyiv described the situation over the past week as “extremely difficult and tense” both in the east and the south of the country.
“The enemy has chosen the east as its main direction. The offensive there has been going on since January in several directions,” Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Malyar said on August 7. She said “the east was the epicenter of hostilities all last week.”
Malyar also said that Russian forces “want to regain the territories they lost in the Kharkiv region.”
In Russia, officials claimed that a Ukrainian drone was shot down southwest of Moscow overnight, amid a surge in drone attacks targeting the capital.
The drone was shot down by the anti-aircraft defense system in the Ferzikovsky district of Kaluga Province, less than 200 kilometers southwest of Moscow, regional Governor Vladislav Shapsha said.
The incident “affected neither people nor infrastructure,” he wrote on Telegram on August 7.
Ukrainian drone attacks have increased in recent weeks, mostly targeting Moscow as well as the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula.
Meanwhile, the head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Andriy Yermak, wrote on Telegram that 22 war prisoners returned to Ukraine from Russian captivity on August 7.
Some 2,600 Ukrainian solders have been released from captivity in prisoner exchanges that have taken place periodically between Russia and Ukraine since the conflict began in February 2022.
There was no immediate comment from Russia about the latest prisoner exchange. In most cases, the warring parties hand over about the same number of prisoners as the other side.
In other developments, a conference hosted by Saudi Arabia to discuss a peace plan for Ukraine was successful because it showed the willingness of the international community to work toward ending the war, a German government spokesperson said on August 7.
“Germany will also continue to engage actively including in this process,” the spokesperson said in Berlin.
With reporting by Reuters
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