By Yuliia Dysa
DNIPRO, Ukraine (Reuters) -A Russian missile attack in southeastern Ukraine on Tuesday killed at least 11 people, local officials said, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged Kyiv’s allies at a NATO summit to bolster Ukraine’s defence industry.
The two-wave strike killed nine in the regional capital Dnipro, said governor Serhiy Lysak, where the blast wave also showered scores of train passengers with broken glass and damaged schools and a hospital.
Lysak said 18 children were among the 153 injured.
Two people were also killed in the town of Samar, around 10 km (six miles) from Dnipro, the state emergencies service said. Officials did not provide details of damage there.
The rare daytime attack came as Zelenskiy pressed NATO member states in the Netherlands to boost their investment in Ukraine’s growing defence sector and crack down on the supply of the foreign components that he said Russia uses to build its weapons.
“This is not a fight where it’s hard to choose a side,” he wrote on X in response to the strike. “Standing with Ukraine means defending life.”
Zelenskiy was also expected to meet U.S. President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the summit.
Russia has stepped up air strikes on Ukraine in recent weeks, particularly its capital Kyiv, where 28 people were killed on June 17 in the deadliest such attack this year.
Another 10 people were killed in air attacks on Kyiv and the surrounding region on Monday.
After Tuesday’s attack on Dnipro, stunned residents surveyed a badly damaged apartment building and battered cars. At a nearby church, windows were blown out and scattered across the altar.
Priest Serhii Narolskyi said he had been holding a service at the time of the attack, which was preceded by an air raid alert.
“It happened in a split second. You opened your eyes, and there were no windows or doors anywhere,” he said. “Everything was in a half-destroyed state.”
(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa and Mykhailo Moskalenko in Dnipro; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by David Goodman, Mark Heinrich and Kevin Liffey)
