Six-year-old boy killed in Russian shelling of Kherson region village

A six-year-old boy has been killed in Russian assault on a village in the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Kherson region, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office reported on Thursday.

Projectiles launched by Russian troops carrying out a strike on the village of Novodmytrivka in the early hours of Thursday morning landed on a family home, the Prosecutor General’s Office said, adding that the boy’s 13-year-old brother had been taken to hospital where he is in a critical condition.

According to Ukraine’s official casualty statistics, 504 children have been killed and a further 1,123 have been injured since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February last year.

Meanwhile, in southern Russia’s Kursk region, the shelling of a village near the Ukrainian border has left one person dead, Kursk Governor Roman Starovoyt reported on Thursday.

He said that an employee at a local distillery had “died before an ambulance could get there”, and blamed Ukraine for the attack.

The governor also reported the Ukrainian shelling of Gordeyevka, another village in the area, which he said had been hit by at least 10 artillery shells, although no injuries had been reported.