Several killed as Russia bombs blood bank in Kharkiv, Zelensky says

SEVERAL people have been killed and injured after Russian forces bombed a blood bank eastern Ukraine, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.

A Russian guided aerial bomb hit the transfusion centre in the town of Kupiansk in the eastern Kharkiv region late on Saturday.

“There are dead and wounded,” he said on his Telegram channel.

The report has not yet been independently verified.

Kupiansk is a railway hub fewer than 10 miles from the front.

Zelensky said rescue workers were extinguishing a fire at the scene and described the strike as a “war crime.”

He did not say how many people were killed or wounded.

Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians in a full-scale invasion that has killed thousands of people, uprooted millions and destroyed cities.

The reported strike came shortly after Zelensky said Russian missiles had hit a facility of the Ukrainian aeronautics group Motor Sich, one of several companies requisitioned by the government since Moscow’s invasion.

The Motor Sich site was near Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine, around 190 miles southwest of Kyiv.

The Khmelnytskyi region, hundreds of miles from the front lines of the fighting and home to a major Ukrainian airbase, has been regularly targeted by Russian strikes in recent months.

The bombing of the blood bank comes hours after a top Putin ally demanded revenge on Ukraine after two marine drone attacks.

The almost identical kamikaze sea drone strikes that occurred in the space of just 24 hours were branded a “terrorist attack” by Maria Zakharova.

The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman vowed to “punish” those responsible for the strikes on the President’s prized warships.

Ukraine first unleashed a sea drone attack on the key Russian port and naval base Novorossiysk.

Another 450kg of TNT explosives were then sent barrelling into a 4,754-ton Russian oil and chemical tanker in the Black Sea.