Global Courant
Kyiv, Ukraine –
Concerns over the safety of the civilian population increased in Ukraine on Saturday, when officials announced that an inspection had found nearly a quarter of the country’s bomb shelters locked or unusable, just days after a woman in Kiev reportedly died during the waiting outside a shuttered bomb shelter during a Russian missile barrage.
Ukraine’s interior ministry said through its press office on Saturday that of “more than 4,800” shelters it had inspected, 252 were closed and another 893 “unfit for use”.
That same day, the Kyiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office reported that four people had been detained outside the closed shelter in a criminal investigation into the death of the 33-year-old 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 prosecutor’s office, the suspects risk 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.
In a Telegram update, Klitschko reported that “nearly half” of complaints related to locked facilities, while about a quarter related to poor condition. 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.
Russia launched a barrage of missiles into the Ukrainian capital before dawn on Thursday, killing a 9-year-old, her mother and another woman, in what was the highest toll of a single attack on Kiev in the past month. A 33-year-old woman died as she and others waited to enter a locked shelter, leaving the group at the mercy of falling missile fragments, her husband told Ukrainian media.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian regional officials reported Saturday morning that Russian shelling has killed at least four civilians across the country in the past 24 hours. A 67-year-old man died in the early hours of Saturday as Russian troops shelled the northeastern Kharkiv region, local governor Oleh Syniehubov said on Telegram. According to Syniehubov, two other civilians were killed on Friday and overnight, while six others, including a 3-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. Prokudin also 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. Gladkov added that another woman was hospitalized with injuries and blamed Ukraine for the attack.
The above claims made by regional authorities in Ukraine and Russia could not be immediately verified.
