US Edition
A 124-year-old art gallery in Odesa has been damaged by a Russian air attack that also injured at least eight people, Ukrainian officials have said.
Odesa’s city council released footage showing blown out windows and debris inside what it said was the Odesa National Fine Art Museum.
A hole that was several metres deep could be seen on a street outside.
“On November 6, the Odesa National [Fine] Art Museum turns 124 years old,” said Oleh Kiper, the governor of Odesa.
“On the eve of November 6, the Russians ‘congratulated’ our architectural monument with a missile that hit nearby.”
The museum, which is located in one of the oldest tsarist-era palaces of Odesa, housed more than 10,000 pieces of art before the war, including paintings by some of the best-known Russian and Ukrainian artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Notable works included Ivan Aivazovsky’s Night on the Black Sea from 1879, Ivan Shishkin’s After the Rain from 1881, and Konstantin Makovsky’s Romeo and Juliet from 1890.
Photos and video showed shattered windows and doors, and some paintings lying on the floor amid debris strewn across the galleries.
The museum said that seven exhibitions, most featuring the work of contemporary Ukrainian artists, were damaged.
Mr Kiper said that most of the collection had already been removed since the start of the war.
“Canvases and paintings from the current exhibition were not damaged,” he said on social media.
Air defences shot down 15 out of 22 Iranian-made Shahed drones and an X-59 missile during the overnight attack on the southern Black Sea port city, the Ukrainian air force said on Monday.
Five of the eight people wounded by the Russian attack were taken to hospital, according to local authorities.
The strikes also set ablaze trucks loaded with grain and damaged about 20 multi-storey buildings and more than two dozen cars, Ukraine’s interior ministry said.
It was not clear whether the buildings and the trucks were hit by drones or falling debris.
The Ukrainian air force said in a statement that Moscow’s forces had launched four different missiles targeting the southern Odesa and Kherson regions.
The drones and missiles were launched from the occupied Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.
Russia has intensified its bombardments of Ukrainian ports, including Odesa, and grain infrastructure since July after Moscow pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
The UN-brokered deal enabled Ukraine to export food to global markets despite the war, supplies that were critical for several countries facing the threat of hunger crises.
There was no immediate comment from Russia on the Odesa attack.
But Andriy Yermak, the head of the office of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, suggested that the attack was a response to Ukrainian strikes on Crimea.
“This is their despicable answer to the reality – the Ukrainian Crimea will be demilitarised, without the Black Sea fleet and military bases of the Russians,” he said.
On Sunday, Ukraine confirmed that it had fired a volley of cruise missiles at a Russian shipyard in Crimea, hitting a warship in an attack that could further undermine Moscow’s offensive capabilities in the region.
Kyiv’s forces have frequently attacked Russia’s navy in the Black Sea in the past year, forcing the Kremlin to withdraw warships from its naval base at Sevastopol and redeploy them further along the coast.