INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Ukraine insists the strikes are fair retaliation for Russian attacks on its own energy infrastructure that have plunged millions into
darkness.Russia's Defense Ministry meanwhile claimed the capture of a village in eastern Ukraine close to the strategically important city
of Pokrovsk.The Defense Ministry in a briefing said it captured the village of Hrodivka, a settlement in the Donetsk region near Pokrovsk,
as Russian troops close in on the key logistics hub.The settlement with an estimated pre-war population of around 2,000 is the latest in a
series of towns in the Donetsk region to have fallen to Russian forces, as they push towards Pokrovsk.Last week, Ukraine's army said that it
had withdrawn from the mining town of Vuhledar also in the Donetsk region, handing Russia one of its most significant territorial advances
brothers aged 35 and 38 in the eastern region of Sumy and a 61-year-old woman in the southern Kherson region.The governor of Kherson later
said a Russian strike on the town had wounded 13 people and damaged an educational facility and various residential buildings were
damaged.And in the Zaporizhzhia region, which Russia claimed to have annexed alongside three other Ukrainian regions in 2022, three people
were wounded after Russian attacks on infrastructure facilities, local authorities said.Russian forces also launched several missiles and
dozens of drones overnight at Ukraine, the air force in Kyiv said, with two missiles shot down over the capital and the third exploding near
an airfield in the central Khmelnytsky region.Authorities in Kyiv said debris from the downed missiles had landed near a kindergarten.
