Rescuers were searching for survivors on Tuesday morning from two Russian missile strikes on a small eastern Ukrainian city just 37 minutes apart the previous night in what Ukrainian officials said was an attempt to harm emergency workers responding to the first attack.

At least seven people — including one rescuer — were killed in the Monday evening strikes on Pokrovsk, about 69km to the east of the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk and 48km from the front line. Officials said 81 people were injured, including 38 emergency workers and two children.

The search for survivors had been suspended overnight because of the threat of additional attacks, according to Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. At least 12 multistorey buildings including a hotel, a prosecutor’s office, a pharmacy, shops and two cafés were damaged, Ukrainian officials said. By noon on Tuesday, 63 tons of rubble were removed from the city centre, the Ukrainian interior ministry said.

The missiles landed in the city centre and damaged several high-rise buildings, as well as homes, administrative buildings and a hotel, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the regional military administration. Photos of the wreckage showed a five-storey building with a chunk of the top floor missing and many of its window frames badly warped. Debris littered a children’s playground.

The successive attacks were devastating even for residents who had largely grown accustomed to living their daily lives miles from the front line. It appeared to be what Ukrainian officials call a “double-tap attack”, a tactic aimed at killing emergency workers or firefighters responding to the scene of an initial strike.

Kyrylenko said that authorities had received a warning about 10 minutes before the second missile hit.

“If there had been a crowd of people and no additional measures had been taken literally in 10 minutes, the consequences would have been much worse,” he said on national television.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials praised the heroism of the emergency workers and mourned Andrii Omelchenko, a rescuer killed by the second missile.

New York Times News Service