KYIV: At least 21 people were killed on Friday (Jul 24) in Russian and Ukrainian long-range strikes - including at a gathering of Ukraine's defence industry just outside Kyiv and at a factory hundreds of miles east of Moscow.Both sides have been intensifying drone and missile strikes with diplomacy on ending the four-and-a-half-year war at a standstill.In the most deadly attack, a Russian missile strike outside the Ukrainian capital killed at least 10 people and wounded around 100, Ukraine's prosecutor general said.Other officials and industry figures said the strike hit an arms exhibition.
Ukrainian prosecutors opened a criminal probe into the organisation of the event - the latest Russian strike on a gathering of military and defence figures in the war.A Russian aerial bomb also killed five people in the frontline city of Sloviansk and damaged Latvia's honorary consulate there."Russia has long abandoned any regard for international norms - and for human values," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on social media."Their only interest is in continuing the killing."Overnight, his army launched a wave of long-range drone and missile attacks on Russia.Moscow said an attack on a factory more than 1,000km from the front in the city of Kirov killed six people.Ukraine also attacked warehouses belonging to Russian online retail giant Wildberries outside Saint Petersburg - targeting Russia's equivalent of Amazon for the third time in a week.The strikes come as the war has seen more civilians dying this summer than in any period since the first months of Russia's invasion, according to the United Nations.Zelenskyy said the "key military enterprise" hit in Russia's Kirov "supplies components for the occupier's aircraft and missile systems, which are used in the massive attacks against our cities".Kirov governor Alexander Sokolov confirmed Kyiv targeted a "factory" and that the six victims were killed on the spot. Another 26 were wounded.While Kyiv has hit Russian towns as far as the Urals and Siberia, it has mostly damaged energy infrastructure, with deaths so deep into Russia rare.
