War in Ukraine latest news: Zelensky hits out as Russian retaliation sees blood transfusion centre attacked

Russia launched a multi-wave overnight attack on Ukraine with 70 air-assault weapons including cruise and hypersonic missiles as well as Iranian-made drones, Kyiv’s Air Force said on Sunday, and at least 10 missiles appear to got through air defences.

Local media said a worker at a grain silo had been wounded in the overnight attack, which appeared to be focused on an area of western Ukraine, far from the front line.

“In total, in several waves of attacks, from the evening of Aug. 5 to the morning of Aug. 6, 2023, the enemy used 70 means of air assault weapons,” the Air Force said. “Information about Kinzhals is classified,” the Ukrainian military noted.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said people had been killed and wounded in an earlier hit to a blood transfusion centre in the town of Kupiansk, a railway hub fewer than 10 miles from the front in the eastern Kharkiv region.

Rescue workers were extinguishing a fire at the scene, he said on Saturday evening, describing the strike as a “war crime.” He did not say how many casualties there were.

In a rare interview the First Lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska, has spoken to Independent TV about her work rebuilding Ukraine in the middle of war, the pressures on her family and concerns for the future of her country.

From the presidential palace, she told The Independent’s Bel Trew about the need to reconstruct cities despite the fighting raging on, about building cutting-edge facilities to treat the country’s’ war-wounded and fighting stigma on trauma around the country.

Watch the full interview on Independent TV, across mobile and connected TV from Monday 7 August.

Three people have died during a night of air strikes and intense shelling across Ukraine, officials said on Sunday, as Kyiv’s military exchanged fire with Russian occupation forces.

Two people were killed and four more were injured following a Russian air strike in Ukraine‘s Kharkiv region, said the head of the local regional military administration, Oleh Syniehubov.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a guided bomb had hit a blood transfusion centre in the area’s Kupyan district late on Saturday.

“This war crime alone says everything about Russian aggression,” Mr Zelensky wrote on social media. “Defeating terrorists is a matter of honour for everyone who values life.”

A woman in her 80s was also killed by Ukrainian shelling in the Russian-held Donetsk, the city’s Moscow-appointed mayor Alexei Kulemzin said on Sunday.

The attack also set alight the main building of the M Tugan-Baranovsky University of Economics and Trade, said the Moscow-installed head of the illegally annexed Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin.

A hostile drone was destroyed by air defences as it approached Moscow on Sunday, city mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.

Sobyanin wrote on messaging app Telegram that the drone approached Moscow around 11am (8am GMT).

Russia accused Ukraine of two drone attacks on its capital last week.

Moscow’s Vnukovo airport suspended flights on Sunday, citing unspecified reasons outside of its control, the TASS news agency reported.

Vnukovo previously carried out similar suspensions when the Russian capital was attacked by drones last week.

Russia launched a multi-wave overnight attack on Ukraine, using 70 air-assault weapons, including cruise and hypersonic missiles and Iranian-made drones, Kyiv’s Air Force said on Sunday.

The Air Force – which is celebrated in a holiday on Sunday – said on the Telegram messaging channel that Ukraine’s air defence destroyed 30 out of 40 cruise missiles and all 27 of the Shahed drones that Russia launched overnight.

“In total, in several waves of attacks, from the evening of Aug. 5 to the morning of Aug. 6, 2023, the enemy used 70 means of air assault weapons,” the Air Force said.

It also said Russia launched three Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, but would not disclose further information on them.

It was not immediately clear whether there was any damage from the overnight attack or what happened to the 10 cruise missiles that were not shot down.

Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat told the national Ukrainian broadcaster that one of the key targets for Russia’s overnight attack was the Khmelnytskiy region.

“Now, it is the Starokostiantyniv airfield that haunts the enemy,” Ihnat said.

Russia had earlier targeted the Starokostiantyniv military airfield in the Khmelnytskiy region at the end of July.

On the battlefields of Ukraine, the fog of war plagues soldiers. And far from the fighting, a related and just as disorienting miasma afflicts those who seek to understand what’s happening in the vast war.

Disinformation, misinformation and absent information all cloud civilians’ understanding. Officials from each side denounce devious plots being prepared by the enemy, which never materialize. They claim victories that can’t be confirmed — and stay quiet about defeats.

None of this is unique to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Any nation at war bends the truth — to boost morale on the home front, to rally support from its allies, to try to persuade its detractors to change their stance.

But Europe’s largest land war in decades — and the biggest one since the dawn of the digital age — is taking place in a superheated information space. And modern communications technology, theoretically a force for improving public knowledge, tends to multiply the confusion because deceptions and falsehoods reach audiences instantly.

Harrowing new accounts of Ukrainians being tortured during Russia’s eight-month occupation of Kherson are “just the tip of the iceberg”, an international team investigating the alleged war crimes has warned.

The UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Dr Alice Jill Edwards, told The Independent that similarities in the accounts of victims across several different regions of Ukraine “expose a deeper concern that torture and intimidation are a policy and strategy of the Russian state”.