Three killed in Russian shelling of Ukrainian city Kharkiv – local officials

KHARKIV, Ukraine (Reuters) -Three civilians were killed and 17 wounded in a pre-dawn rocket attack on the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Thursday, the local emergency service said.

In a post on Facebook, the agency said 40 rescuers had worked to deal with the attack's aftermath, and that eight people had been rescued from the rubble.

The strike followed a Russian attack on Kharkiv on Wednesday, in which the emergencies service said 12 people were killed.

"Last night was one of the most tragic of the entire war in the Kharkiv region," local governor Oleh Synehubov wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Synehubov also said two people were killed on Thursday in a rocket attack on the town of Krasnohrad in the Kharkiv region.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described Wednesday's attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, as a "devious and cynical strike on civilians with no justification".

"We cannot forgive. We will avenge it," he said.

Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians in what it calls a "special military operation" in Ukraine.

Kharkiv resident Tamara Kramarenko said the dormitory where she lived had been hit by a missile on Wednesday.

"Bang, grey. Grey fog … we got three windows – nothing else left! The stairs started collapsing, people started helping each other," she told Reuters.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the eastern region of Donetsk, said on Telegram that three civilians had been killed in Russian attacks in the region in the past 24 hours.

(Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic and Max Hunder; Editing by Tom Hogue, Timothy Heritage and Alex Richardson)

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