KHERSON, Ukraine — At least one Russian rocket slammed into a busy street in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson on Tuesday, killing six people as Vladimir Putin delivered a speech marking a year of war in Ukraine, local officials said.
Ukraine's military and city authorities said 12 others were wounded in the attack, which a Reuters correspondent on the scene shortly afterwards said left a pool of blood on the pavement beside a mangled bus stop.
The blast also badly damaged a line of shop-fronts behind the bus stop, took down power cables and shattered windows on the opposite side of the street.
Photographs posted online by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had earlier shown corpses lying in the street.
"This time of day it’s very crowded here so there are probably many casualties," Viktoria, a woman waiting for a bus who declined to give her last name, told Reuters.
"It’s really scary. They also shoot where we live."
Local authorities said Kherson came under fire from multiple rocket launchers as the Russian president delivered a speech describing the West as the aggressor in Ukraine and depicting his country as not waging war on the Ukrainian people.
Russia did not immediately comment on the events in Kherson, where the Ukrainian military said about 20 rockets were fired at the city.
Moscow has denied deliberately targeting civilians in its "special military operation", but cities across Ukraine have been devastated in missile and drone attacks and thousands of civilians have been killed.
"The Russian army is heavily shelling Kherson. Again mercilessly killing the civilian population," Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
"The world has no right to forget for a single moment that Russian cruelty and aggression know no bounds."
Ukraine recaptured Kherson in November after eight months of Russian occupation, forcing Russian forces to abandon the only regional capital they had captured since invading Ukraine on Feb. 24 last year.
The city of Kherson and surrounding areas are now under almost constant bombardment from Russian forces on the opposite side of the Dnipro River.
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