Civilian casualties rising in Ukraine as fighting rages

On Monday, mourners at a memorial for those killed by a Russian airstrike hit a shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk.

After an airstrike leveled a shopping mall in central Ukraine last week, attention turned to the large human cost of the war far from the battlefield. In smaller-scale attacks that claim a handful of lives, civilian deaths are slowly rising day by day across the country. Even in cities and towns that have not been terribly affected by the war's fiercest fighting, civilian casualties have been steadily rising. Vitaly Kim, the governor of the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine, said in a news briefing Wednesday that they might be going for military structures but they are mostly hitting civilian infrastructure. I think they are trying to frighten the local population and demoralize our military. Another five people were injured in the attack, and a search and rescue operation was underway. A day earlier, shelling in the nearby city of Ochakiv killed three people, including a 6 year-old girl. A 3 month-old infant was fighting for life in a hospital. The situation for the 250,000 civilians in Mykolaiv has not been safe, according to Mr. Kim, noting that safety had deteriorated significantly in the last three weeks. We can't determine where the enemy might strike. They are not keeping to any norms of combat, and they are hitting civilian objects all the time. The head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Council, Mykola Lukashuk, said in a post on the Telegram app that two missiles had hit the city on Tuesday. One damaged dozens of cars and the area around the gas station and car repair shop, and another destroyed some structures at the industrial complex. Mr. Lukashuk wrote that the Ukrainian State Emergency Service is now conducting rescue works, dismantling the rubble and searching for survivors. Two people were killed and three others were injured by Russian shelling of communities in Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine on Tuesday, according to Dmytro Zhyvyvytskyi, the governor of the region. One person was killed in a shelling accident in Donetsk, local officials said. Two civilians were killed and at least six wounded in attacks in the Kharkiv region, when shells hit a residential building and a business. Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, is located 25 miles from the Russian border. The governor of the region, Oleh Synehubov, said there was no plan to evacuate civilians. Synehubov said in an interview on Ukrainian television that he believes such an evacuation would only be necessary if the city of Kharkiv was stormed.