By Vitalii Hnidyi
KUPIANSK, Ukraine (Reuters) -A Russian missile struck a museum in the centre of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk on Tuesday, killing two women and wounding 10 other people, the state emergency service said.
Rescue workers dug through mounds of rubble to retrieve the bodies after the local history museum was hit by what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff and the regional governor said was a Russian S-300 missile.
Anatolii Haivoronskyi, who used to work at the museum, said the museum director had been trapped under the rubble.
“And that’s a (museum) worker,” he said, standing in the rain outside the devastated building and looking at a body bag on the ground.
Yulia, a resident who gave no surname, said she had been at the post office when she heard three explosions in the morning attack.
“Civilians are suffering every day… Today’s attack took place at 8:55 a.m., the … museum was hit, and I guess some people were injured or died there. Civilians, not soldiers. There were no weapons there,” she said.
Zelenskiy posted a video of a devastated building that had spewed out rubble and debris into the street. Its windows were smashed and a section of the wall and roof was destroyed.
“The terrorist country is doing everything to destroy us completely,” he wrote in a Telegram post. “Our history, our culture, our people.”
Russia did not immediately comment on the attack. It denies deliberately targeting civilians in its full-scale invasion that has killed thousands of people, uprooted millions and flattened buildings in cities, towns and villages across Ukraine.
Kupiansk, which had a pre-war population of 26,000, is an important rail hub that was occupied by Russian forces for months after they invaded Ukraine in February, 2022. Ukrainian forces drove them out of Kupiansk last September.
(Reporting by Olena Harmash and Dan Peleshchuk, Writing by Tom Balmforth, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
