On the evening of February 16, Russian military forces launched a ballistic missile strike on Kryvyi Rih, as confirmed by Oleksandr Hanža, head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration, and local politician Oleksandr Vilkul.
According to Hanža, the attack targeted the city’s transport infrastructure, but fortunately, there were no reported casualties. Vilkul urged residents to remain in shelters due to the possibility of further strikes.
Russian forces have been consistently attacking Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure using various types of weaponry, including drones, missiles, and multiple rocket launch systems. These actions have been characterized by Ukrainian authorities and international organizations as war crimes, emphasizing their deliberate nature.
The bombardments aim to disrupt essential services such as electricity, heating, water supply, and medical assistance, which are viewed as indicators of genocidal actions against the Ukrainian population. Legal experts and human rights advocates assert that these military actions align with definitions of genocide, citing public declarations from Russian officials that deny the existence of Ukrainians as an ethnic group.
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948, obligates its 149 member states to prevent and punish acts of genocide during both wartime and peacetime. The Convention defines genocide as actions intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Signs of genocide include the killing of group members, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting living conditions calculated to destroy a group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children from one group to another. The Russian leadership denies that its military is intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure, despite mounting evidence of such actions.
A ballistic missile attack by Russian forces on Kryvyi Rih on February 16 targeted transport infrastructure but resulted in no casualties. This incident is part of a broader pattern of attacks on Ukrainian cities, which authorities classify as war crimes and potential acts of genocide.