A Russian missile attack in eastern Ukraine kills a 10-year-old boy, a day after a rocket killed 51

Russia unleashed new air strikes on Ukraine early on Friday, killing a 10-year-old boy and his grandmother in the city of Kharkiv and damaging grain and port infrastructure in the Odesa region in the south, Ukrainian officials said.

The boy and his grandmother were killed when Russia hit Ukraine’s second biggest city with two Iskander ballistic missiles, regional governor Oleh Synehubov said. Twenty-eight others were wounded, including an 11-month-old baby, he said.

The boy’s father, Oleh Bychko, said he had managed to pull his younger son and wife out of the rubble after the strike. Bychko, his face scratched and his clothes covered in blood, stood shocked and lost for words after the death of his 10-year-old son, Tymofiy. Reporters saw emergency crews pulling the body of the boy – who was wearing pyjamas with a Spiderman design – from the rubble of a building.

The missile attack destroyed much of a residential building, where rescue workers worked among the rubble of bricks, twisted metal and wood.

The attacks followed a Russian missile strike on Thursday in which Ukrainian officials said dozens of people were killed in the village of Hroza in northeastern Ukraine during a gathering to mourn a fallen Ukrainian soldier. The attack on Hroza was one of the deadliest single strikes on civilians since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

A Russian missile slammed into a cafe and grocery store in a village in northeastern Ukraine on Thursday, killing 52 people during a gathering to mourn a fallen Ukrainian soldier, Ukrainian officials said.

Large piles of bricks, shattered metal and building materials remained where the cafe and shop were hit early in the afternoon in Hroza village in Kharkiv region.

“A deliberate missile strike on a village in Kharkiv region on an ordinary store and cafe,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address, delivered while attending a summit of the European Political Community in Spain. “Russian troops could not have been unaware of where they were hitting. This was no blind strike.”

He added that a six-year-old boy was among the dead in what appeared to be one of the biggest civilian death tolls in any single Russian strike.

Moscow did not immediately comment on the events in Hroza. Moscow denies deliberately targeting civilians, but many have been killed in attacks that have hit residential areas as well as energy, defence, port, grain and other facilities.

And here are Mr Putin’s claims:

Russian patriotic bloggers have poured scorn on president Vladimir Putin’s intimation that mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane was blown up with hand grenades, while those on board were high on cocaine and alcohol.

The private jet on which Prigozhin was travelling to St Petersburg crashed north of Moscow killing all 10 people on board on August 23, including Dmitry Utkin, co-founder of the mercenary Wagner group, four bodyguards and a crew of three.

Mr Putin said on Thursday fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of the dead and that investigators had ruled out any external impact on the plane such as a missile.

However, he said investigators had been wrong not to have carried out alcohol and drug blood tests, given that 5kg of cocaine had been found by the Federal Security Service at Wagner premises in St Petersburg earlier this year.

Wagner communications channels were silent, but some supporters and patriotic bloggers expressed disbelief.

The Children of the Arbat pro-war Telegram channel posted: “So a short summary: the most combat-ready unit in the history of modern Russia was commanded by alcoholics and junkies who, being professional military men, did not know how to handle hand grenades?”

Russia scrambled a MiG-31 fighter jet on Friday to escort a US Navy P-8A Poseidon patrol plane approaching its airspace over the Norwegian Sea, the Russian Defence Ministry said.

A Ukrainian court has frozen the Ukrainian assets of three Russian businessmen over their alleged support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, prosecutors and the security service said on Friday.

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) said assets owned by Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven and Andrey Kosogov had been frozen. They were considered part of President Vladimir Putin’s close circle and contributed to “large-scale financing of the Russian Federation’s armed aggression”, it said.

The three businessmen did not immediately comment on the moves and comments by the SBU and prosecutors.

“At the request of prosecutors… assets of 20 Ukrainian companies totalling over 17 billion hryvnias ($464.48 million)were frozen,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said on the Telegram messaging app.

It said the frozen assets included securities and corporate rights of mobile phone operators, a mineral water producer, financial and insurance companies.

“The beneficial owners of the companies are three Russian oligarchs who own one of the largest Russian financial and investment consortia,” it said.

A Turkish-flagged general cargo ship that was sailing on Thursday in the Black Sea en route to Ukraine’s Izmail port did not sustain damage from an explosion, Turkey’s maritime authority and the ship’s captain told Reuters on Friday.

“An explosion occurred 15-20 meters behind the Kafkametler ship en route to Izmail port from Batumi port while it was cruising off the coast of Romania/Sulina (port),” the authority said.

The ship continued sailing to its destination to deliver its cargo following checks and there was no evidence that the explosion was caused by a mine, it added.

Maritime sources said on Thursday that the vessel had hit a sea mine and sustained minor damage, although the crew was safe.

The vessel’s Istanbul-based operator Kafkametler Maritime said the vessel was currently on its way to Izmail port and ship congestion in the Danube channel meant it was moving slower. The company added that the crew were safe and the vessel did not need any maintenance.

The vessel’s captain said separately in a statement that while the cause of the blast was not clear, the explosion appeared to have been caused by a bottom mine in the Black Sea.