Russia strikes apartments; Ukrainian refugees detained at border

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian missiles hit apartment buildings in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday, a local official said, killing three people and wounding at least 12 in a region that houses Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant and which Moscow has illegally annexed.

The two strikes, the first before dawn and another in the morning, damaged more than 40 buildings, authorities said. The attacks came hours after Ukraine’s president announced that his military had retaken three more villages in another of the four regions annexed by Russia, Moscow’s latest battlefield reversal.

The Zaporizhzhia regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh wrote on Telegram that many people were rescued from the multistory buildings, including a 3-year-old girl who was taken to a hospital. Photos provided by the Emergency Service of Ukraine showed rescuers scrambling through the wreckage of a building looking for survivors.

“Absolute meanness. Absolute evil,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskky said of the attacks, in a video speech to the inaugural summit of the European Political Community in Prague. “There have already been thousands of manifestations of such evil. Unfortunately, there may be thousands more.”

Zaporizhzhia is one of the regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed as Russian territory in violation of international laws. The region is home to a sprawling nuclear power plant under Russian occupation; the city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency announced upon arrival in Kyiv on Thursday that the U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog will increase the number of inspectors at the Zaporizhzhia plant from two to four.

The agency’s director general, Rafael Grossi, plans to discuss with Ukrainian officials, and later in Moscow with Russian officials, efforts to set up a secure protection zone around the nuclear power station. Grossi said mines appear to have been planted around the perimeter of the plant, which has been damaged during the war and caused worries of a possible radiation disaster.

Putin signed a decree Wednesday declaring that Russia was taking over the six-reactor facility, a move Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called a criminal act that was “null and void.”

Ukraine’s state nuclear operator, Energoatom, said it would continue to operate the plant, whose last operating reactor was shut down on Sept. 11 because of frequent outages of external power needed to run critical safety systems. Transmission lines to the plant were repeatedly shelled.

Outside the battlefront, Russian authorities detained several hundred Ukrainians trying to flee Russian-occupied areas Wednesday near the Russian-Estonian border, according to Ukrainian Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets. Citing the Estonian Ministry of Internal Affairs, he wrote on Facebook that Russian forces took the Ukrainians on trucks to an unknown destination.

Most of the detained Ukrainians had fled through Russia and Crimea and were seeking ways to enter the European Union — Estonia is a member state — or find a way to return home, Lubinets wrote.

Russia has forced thousands of Ukrainians into “filtration camps” to determine their loyalties. Zelenskyy said Thursday more than 1.6 million Ukrainians have been deported to Russia.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, sent its international development chief to Kyiv on Thursday, the highest-ranking American official to visit Ukraine since Russia illegally annexed the four regions. The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, was meeting with government officials and residents. She said the U.S. would provide an additional $55 million to repair heating pipes and other equipment.

USAID said the United States had delivered $9.89 billion in aid to Ukraine since February. A spending bill that U.S. President Joe Biden signed last week promises another $12.3 billion for Ukraine’s military and public services needs.

The European Union on Thursday froze the assets of an additional 37 people and entities tied to Russia’s war in Ukraine, bringing the total of EU blacklist targets to 1,351. The newly sanctioned people include officials involved in last week’s illegal Russian annexations and sham referendums. The latest sanctions also widen trade bans against Russia and prepare for a price cap on Russian oil.