Firefighters tackle a blaze at the site of a missile strike on a residential building in Sumy, Ukraine, on Sunday night that killed 11 people, including a 9-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl, and injured dozens. Photo by State Emergency Service of Ukraine/EPA-EFE
Nov. 18 (UPI) — At least 11 people were killed and scores injured in multiple waves of Russian missile strikes overnight on the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, about 30 miles from the border with Russia’s Kursk region.
All 11 fatalities, including a 9-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl, occurred after a ballistic missile struck a nine-story apartment block in a densely populated district of the city, regional authorities said.
The State Emergency Service of Ukraine said in a Telegram post that at least 89 people were injured in the attacks, including 11 children.
Later waves of strikes in the early hours of Monday damaged the city’s energy infrastructure, cutting power to some districts.
“Sunday evening for the city of Sumy became hell, a tragedy brought to our land by Russia,” the Sumy Regional Military Administration quoted regional governor Volodymyr Artyukh as saying from the scene of the apartment building strike in a social media post.
Sending his condolences to the families of the victims, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the strikes as criminal acts for which the perpetrator must not be allowed to go unpunished.
The attacks came hours after it was reported that U.S. President Joe Biden, who is to leave office in two months, had finally granted Zelensky authorization to use American-supplied Army Tactical Missile Systems long-range missiles to strike Russian targets on Russian soil.
The permission is initially for Ukraine to use the weapons in support of its forces occupying part of the neighboring Kursk which are coming under pressure from Russian and North Korean troops, officials told The New York Times.
However, it was reported that Biden may also allow Kyiv to use ATACMS, which have a maximum range of 186 miles, against targets in other Russian regions.
The BBC reported that France and Britain are likely to follow Washington’s lead and lift restrictions on how the Storm Shadow missiles that they supply to Ukraine can be deployed.
Former U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations Kurt Volker said the U.S. policy shift was long overdue given there was no prohibition in international law which states only that missiles must be for self-defense against military targets.
“That’s what we should have stuck to to begin with rather than creating this kind of made-up limitation that we’re now finding awkward to remove,” he told BBC Radio.
The Kremlin reacted by reiterating that Moscow would treat the move as the United States and its NATO partners directly participating in the Ukraine war.
“If such a decision has indeed been formulated and communicated to the Kyiv regime, then, of course, this is a qualitatively new round of escalation of tensions and a qualitatively new situation in terms of the involvement of the United States in this conflict,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.
“We are proceeding from this,” he emphasized.
Peskov said Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously stated that a decision to use Western long-range weapons against Russia would mean nothing less than the “direct involvement of the United States and other NATO countries in the war in Ukraine” that would drastically alter the nature of the conflict, forcing Russia to take appropriate measures in response to the escalating threats.
Putin emphasized that Western tactical support was a prerequisite for Ukraine to be able to strike deep into Russian territory, as satellite intelligence and flight missions would be required.