Ukraine attacked a town in Russia’s Kursk region on Friday, killing six people, including a child, a senior local official said.
Kursk’s acting governor Alexander Khinshtein said ten other people were hospitalized in the city of Rylsk after being hit by US-supplied HIMARS rockets.
Ukrainian officials said the attack followed an earlier Russian missile attack on Kiev.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said a Russian ballistic missile attack on the capital Friday morning killed at least one person, injured 13 and damaged six foreign embassies and a university in the city center.
On its Telegram social media account, Ukraine’s Air Force said it intercepted five Iskander short-range ballistic missiles fired at the city, but falling missile debris caused damage and fires in three districts. City officials reported damage to several residential buildings, medical facilities, and schools.
Air Force officials urged civilians to respond quickly to reports of ballistic attack threats because they leave little time to find shelter.
At a briefing in Kiev on Friday, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Georgy Tykhyi said the missile attack had caused significant damage to the building that houses the embassies of Albania, Argentina, Palestinians, North Macedonia, Portugal and Montenegro. He shared pictures of the damage caused to buildings. No one was reported injured in those attacks.
Kyiv National Linguistics University said on its Instagram account that its building was also affected, and shared a photo of the area near an entrance where two large windows were blown out.
Russia has said it carried out the attack in response to Kiev firing American-made weapons into Russia.
Russia’s attacks on Kiev came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s year-end press conference. Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Putin “has been talking about talks to end the war for a long time, but the bombing continues.”
President-elect Donald Trump has talked about the possibility of talks with the Russian and Ukrainian presidents to end the war. He has said that he can make a deal to end the war in 24 hours.
Kupchan said Trump was “naive” to think he could bring the two countries to an agreement so quickly.
“Trump cannot afford a deal that effectively subjugates Ukraine and turns it into a ward of Russia,” Kupchan said. Ukraine should be on the defensive, he said, and “not in that geopolitical bind “What should be left is that invites Russia to start a war where it left off six months from now… or a year from now.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister Olha Stefanyshina said on Friday that Russia had launched a cyber attack on state registers, resulting in a work stoppage.
Stefanyshna made the initial report from her Facebook page, where she said it was clear that the attack was carried out by Russia to “create panic among citizens of Ukraine and abroad.”
He held a briefing in Kiev on Friday with Volodymyr Karastelov, acting head of the Cybersecurity Department of the Security Service of Ukraine.
He told reporters that although it appears no data was lost or stolen, the ministry has suspended the activities of all state registers to avoid further deployment of threats. The affected registries include civil acts such as marriages, wills, births and car registrations, and Stefanishina said they were working to restore them.
The cybersecurity department said the main line of its investigation was that a hacker group affiliated with Russian military intelligence was behind the attack. Russia has not yet commented on the attack.
VOA’s Kim Lewis contributed to this report. Some information came from Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.