Six civilians were killed and eight wounded in Russian shelling of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine on Sunday morning, a senior Ukrainian official said.

Kostiantynivka, home to about 70,000 people before the war, is just 20km west of Bakhmut, the epicentre of fighting for at least eight months as Russian forces try to capture the city.

“Russians have carried out massive shelling of the town of Kostiantynivka,” Andriy Yermak, head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, said on the Telegram messaging app.

He said 16 apartment buildings, eight private houses, a kindergarten and an administrative building were damaged.

Yermak added photos showing the partial destruction of buildings and craters from explosions.

Absurd: Zelensky

Ukraine’s leader has responded furiously to Russia’s monthlong presidency of the United Nations Security Council, saying it was “obviously absurd and destructive” that the post should pass to Moscow while it continued its invasion.

Russia is scheduled on Monday to preside over a Security Council meeting for the first time since it began the full-scale war in Ukraine almost 14 months ago. The role is a largely ceremonial one, taken for a month at a time in alphabetical order by each of the council’s 15 members.

It has come to Moscow weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin was accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

“Yesterday, the Russian army killed another Ukrainian child — a 5-month-old boy named Danylo,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his nightly address on Saturday. “And at the same time, Russia chairs the UN Security Council. It is hard to imagine something evident that proves the complete bankruptcy of such institutions.”