The death toll from Tuesday's HIMARS attack on Donetsk has jumped to more than 20, a DPR representative from the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC) has reported.
Earlier in the day, Donetsk Mayor Alexey Kulemzin said shelling of the city's Voroshilovsky district had hit the building of the Department of Labor and Social Protection of the Population, causing its ceilings to collapse. The initial death toll was estimated at six people.
DPR head Denis Pushilin said Ukrainian troops used HIMARS systems to carry out the atrocious attack, hitting the city three times - on top of other bombardments that occurred over the day, which injured one person and damaged a residential building and a hospital.
The JCCC confirmed that the Ukrainian military targeted the city three times during the day Tuesday, at 4:25 pm, 4:40 pm and 6:27 pm local time, and said that in addition to HIMARS MLRS, M-31 fragmentation rockets were used.
Constant deadly attacks on the people of Donbass and refusal by Ukraine's successive governments to resolve the crisis peacefully were among the main reasons prompting Russia to kick off its special military operation, which saw the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics - as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye regions - join the Russian Federation via a popular vote last year.
From the start of the escalation in 2014 to the beginning of 2022, several thousand civilians were killed across Donbass as a result of Ukrainian strikes.
The United States and its allies have sent tens of billions of dollars in advanced missiles, rocket artillery, howitzers, drones, cruise missiles and other long-range strike weapons to Kiev over the past 20 months, regularly assuring that the weapons would not be used to target Russian cities or civilians.
The United Nations reported earlier this year that nearly 9,200 civilians had been killed amid the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis from February 2022 and June 30, 2023. In May, the JCCC reported that some 4,527 civilians perished in the DPR alone in a year's time, 3,791 of them in newly liberated territories, and 736 within the DPR's borders prior to the escalation.