Global Courant
Concerns about civilian safety rose in Ukraine on Saturday, when officials announced that an inspection found nearly a quarter of the country’s bomb shelters sealed or unusable, just days after a woman in Kiev reportedly died while standing outside a bomb shelter. with shutters waited during a Russian missile barrage.
Ukraine’s interior ministry said on Saturday through its media service that of “more than 4,800” shelters it had inspected, 252 were locked and another 893 were “unfit for use”.
That same day, the Kyiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office reported that four people had been detained in a criminal investigation into the death of the 33-year-old woman outside the sealed shelter on Thursday.
The prosecutor’s office said one person, a security guard who had failed to open the doors, was still under arrest, while three others, including a local official, were placed under house arrest.
According to the prosecution, the suspects face up to eight years in prison for official negligence that led to the death of a person.
Also on Saturday, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that within a day of launching an online feedback service, the city government received “more than a thousand” complaints about closed, dilapidated or inadequate bomb shelters.
Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko was seen in a bomb shelter during an air raid on Thursday. (Valentine Ogirenko/Reuters)
In an update on the Telegram messaging service, Klitschko reported that “almost half” of complaints related to closed facilities, while about a quarter related to the poor condition of the shelters.
Some 250 Kiev residents signed up to complain about a lack of shelters in the area. The interior ministry said more than 5,300 volunteers, including aid workers, police officers and local officials, will continue to inspect shelters across Ukraine.
More civilians killed
Russia launched a barrage of missiles into the Ukrainian capital before dawn on Thursday, killing a nine-year-old, her mother and another woman, marking the highest toll of a single attack on Kiev in the past month.
The husband of the 33-year-old woman who died told Ukrainian media that the fact that the shelter was closed meant that his wife and others were at the mercy of falling missile fragments.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian regional officials reported Saturday morning that Russian shelling has killed at least four civilians across the country in the past 24 hours.
Earlier this week, a Ukrainian military helicopter flew over the north of the country. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
A 67-year-old man died in the early hours of Saturday when Russian troops shelled the northeastern Kharkiv region with mortars, local governor Oleh Syniehubov said on Telegram.
According to Syniehubov, two other civilians were killed on Friday and overnight, while six others, including a three-year-old boy, were injured.
In the frontline Kherson region in the south, two boys, ages 10 and 13, were hospitalized with “serious” injuries after an explosive device detonated at a village playground on Saturday, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported.
He said five others, including two children, had been wounded by Russian shelling the previous day.
In Sumy province, further west, a Russian mortar shell killed an 85-year-old man as he sat by the orchard in front of his home, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said on Saturday.
Shelling also killed two people in Russia’s Belgorod region just across the border, including an elderly woman who died on the spot, according to local governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, who also said another woman was hospitalized with injuries and blamed Ukraine for the attack.
It was not immediately possible to verify the claims made by regional authorities in Ukraine and Russia.
