French President Emmanuel Macron said Saturday that Paris would deliver new interceptor missiles to Ukraine after Russian strikes reportedly killed four people, including two children. The strikes followed a series of Russian attacks that killed at least 20 people across Ukraine on Friday, including 16 in a daytime drone attack on a busy shopping centre in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih.
A Ukrainian drone attack on Saturday hit a house in southern Russia, killing two children and injuring their parents, officials said, while a daytime ballistic missile attack by Russia killed two outside the capital Kyiv.
“This morning, civilian infrastructure and residential buildings in the Yeysk district came under a drone attack,” said Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Russia’s southern Krasnodar region.
“As a result of yet another vile and cynical strike … two children were killed, and two adults are in the hospital,” he added.
Following the attack, French President Emmanuel Macron said that Paris would deliver new interceptor missiles to Ukraine. “It is crucial to provide Ukraine with all the necessary means to defend its skies and thwart this aggression,” Macron wrote on X, saying he had informed Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in a telephone call of “the strengthening of our support with the delivery of interceptors and the continuation of our cooperation”.
Saturday’s attacks took place a day after a deadly attack on a busy shopping centre.
A separate Ukrainian drone attack on the central region of Samara killed one person, the local governor said.
Around lunchtime on Saturday, Russia fired ballistic missiles towards Kyiv, the Ukrainian air force said – killing two and wounding eight in the Boryspil district, on the eastern edge of the capital.
Overnight Russian attacks had already killed two – one in Kyiv and one in Zaporizhzhia, close to the front line.
The strikes marked the latest escalation in the four-and-a-half-year conflict.
The United Nations reported that the civilian death toll so far this year had risen to its highest level since the first months of the war.
On Monday, Ukraine and its top European allies will host a virtual meeting to look at how to pressure Russia to end its war.
People missing after mall strike
Diplomacy has stalled with the United States, which had brokered several rounds of direct talks between Kyiv and Moscow, distracted by its war on Iran and frustrated the conflict has not been as easy to solve as President Donald Trump had once touted.
In President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s home city of Kryvyi Rig, four people were still missing after Russian drones smashed into a busy shopping centre on Friday afternoon, the regional governor said.
Sixteen people have been confirmed killed and more than 100 wounded.
The strike set the mall ablaze and sent blood-covered victims running for the streets, only for a second drone to fly in around half an hour later — a double-tap attack blasted by Zelensky as “cynical and despicable”.
Mourners placed flowers and letters on the grass outside the mall in a makeshift memorial on Saturday.
An AFP reporter saw machinery piling up twisted and charred metal.
Supermarket shelves stacked with products blackened from the fire were stacked up beneath a cratered ceiling and behind blown-out windows.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
