At least 7 dead, 58 injured after Russian shelling in Kherson

Seven people were killed and at least 58 injured by Russian missile strikes on the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson Saturday, officials said.

Photos of the wreckage were posted on social media by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had just returned from a trip to Washington where he secured another $1.85 billion in military aid and thanked America for helping fund the war effort, in his first trip outside his country since Russia invaded in February.

“It’s terror, it’s killing for the sake of intimidation and pleasure,” Zelensky wrote alongside photos of war-torn Kherson Saturday. “The world must see what absolute evil we are fighting against.”

Deputy head of Zelensky’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said that of the nearly 60 civilians hurt in the shelling of Kherson, which was liberated last month after a months-long Russian occupation, 16 were seriously injured.

“Barbaric shelling of Kherson by Russian terrorists is not only another war crime, but also revenge on its residents who resisted the occupation and proved to the whole world that Kherson is Ukraine,” Ukrainian Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov posted on Twitter.

Meanwhile, at least two were killed and five more were injured in missile strikes in the city of Kurakhove in the eastern part of the country, Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.

Early Saturday morning, British intelligence said Russia has bolstered its forces with tens of thousands of reservists, but Moscow is running low on ammunition, which has limited its long-range missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure to around once a week.

“A vulnerability of Russia’s current operational design is that even just sustaining defensive operations along its lengthy front line requires a significant daily expenditure of shells and rockets,” The UK Ministry of Defence wrote in an intelligence update.

The update came one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin urged his country’s defense industry to continue improving and producing weapons during a visit to Tula, a center for arms manufacturing.