Zelenskyy names intelligence chief as top aide, Russia puts death toll from Ukrainian strike at 27

A Ukrainian drone strike killed 24 people and wounded at least 50 more in a Russian-occupied village in Ukraine’s Kherson region, Russian officials said.

Russian authorities said Friday that the death toll from a Ukrainian drone strike they said struck a café in a Russian-occupied village in Ukraine’s Kherson region rose to 27 people. Kyiv denied attacking civilian targets.

Svetlana Petrenko, spokeswoman of Russia’s main criminal investigation agency, the Investigative Committee, said in a statement that a Ukrainian drone strike on a café and hotel in the village of Khorly, where at least 100 civilians were celebrating New Year’s Eve overnight into Thursday, killed 27 people, including two minors. A total of 31, including five minors, were hospitalized with injuries.

A criminal probe on the charges of carrying out an act of terrorism has been opened, Petrenko said.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s General Staff, Dmytro Lykhovii, denied attacking civilians. He told Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne on Thursday that Ukrainian forces “adhere to the norms of international humanitarian law” and “carry out strikes exclusively against Russian military targets, facilities of the Russian fuel and energy sector, and other lawful targets.”

Lykhovii said that General Staff published an explicit list of targets that the Ukrainian army struck on the night of New Year’s Eve that did not include occupied parts of the Kherson region.