A Missile Strikes the Heart of a Ukrainian City and Then Another

In the center of a small Ukrainian city, rescuers shrouded in smoke and dust dug through what remained of buildings and bodies on Tuesday, looking for survivors after a pair of missile strikes that President Volodymyr Zelensky said had killed at least nine people and wounded 82 others.

Two Russian missiles hit the city center of Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk region, just 37 minutes apart and in nearly the same location on Monday evening. They seriously damaged at least 12 multistory buildings, including a hotel that lay in ruins and a five-floor apartment block with its top floor partly sheared away and its windows blasted out.

Pools of blood in the rubble were still wet on Tuesday, human flesh littered the wreckage, and the smell of smoldering fires hung in the air. On the ground floor of the apartment building, Corleone’s, an Italian restaurant that was popular with volunteers and journalists traveling to the front, was destroyed. Cafes, other businesses and a prosecutor’s office were damaged, and a playground was covered with debris.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that its forces had hit a command post of Ukrainian troops in Pokrovsk, according to the Russian state news agency Tass, which referred to the city by its Soviet-era name, Krasnoarmeysk — Russian for “Red Army town.”

Ukrainian officials rejected the assertion. “Of course this claim by Russia’s deceitful propaganda has no basis in reality,” Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesman for Ukraine’s forces in the east, told Ukrainian Pravda.

Ukrainians said the explosions at 7:15 and 7:52 p.m. Monday local time in Pokrovsk appeared to be a “double-tap attack,” hitting the same target twice, with the second strike maximizing casualties among rescuers and onlookers responding to the first one. That is a tactic Russian forces have used before in Ukraine and Syria.

“This is a deliberate decision of the terrorists to cause the greatest pain and damage,” Mr. Zelensky said on Tuesday in his nightly video address.

One of the confirmed dead and 38 of the injured were emergency workers, officials said. The toll would have been higher, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the regional administration, if the authorities had not received a warning about 10 minutes before the second strike and moved many people away. (The Ukrainian air defenses often detect launches or incoming missiles.)

“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.

The emergency worker killed, Andrii Omelchenko, 52, was the deputy chief of the State Emergency Service for the region.

The search for survivors continued after nightfall, at times lighted only by the fires burning in the ruins. It was suspended overnight because of the threat of additional attacks, according to Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs.

By late Tuesday, 122 tons of rubble had been hauled away, the emergency service said.

Also on Monday evening, Russian forces bombed a village in the Kharkiv region in the country’s northeast, killing two civilians and wounding nine others, according to Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the regional administration. That, too, was a double-tap strike, he said, and four of those injured were emergency workers.

The double strike in Pokrovsk, which Ukrainian officials said was made with Iskander short-range ballistic missiles, was devastating even for residents who had largely grown accustomed to living within 30 miles of the front lines.

Stunned residents gathered outside their ruined homes, waiting to survey the damage and hoping to salvage what they could.

One woman begged to get up to her third-floor apartment, where her cat was trapped on the balcony. The building was unstable, she was told. Eventually, firefighters were able to reach the cat and return it to her.

The devastation at Corleone’s was reminiscent of a Russian missile strike in June on a popular pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, to the northeast, that killed 11 people, including 14-year-old twin sisters, and wounded 61.

Since invading last year, Russian forces have regularly barraged not only civilian infrastructure that the Kremlin calls legitimate military targets, but also civilian sites with no relationship to the war effort, and often far from the battlefield.

That has continued even as Ukraine has waged a slow-moving counteroffensive in the south and east, forcing the Russians to concentrate more of their energies there. The Ukrainian forces have been bolstered by extensive training and weaponry from the West, and by conscription that has swelled its military.

That military expansion has been a source of corruption that Kyiv is trying to tackle, Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation said on Tuesday, announcing that it had opened 112 cases against enlistment officers since the invasion almost a year and a half ago, including 10 in the past week.

Last week, the bureau detained the head of the Kyiv District Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support, whom it did not name, accusing the official of taking part in a large-scale scheme to produce fictitious documents claiming that draft-age men were unfit to serve and allowing them to leave the country — for a bribe of $10,000 apiece.

Similarly, the bureau detained the head of one of Kyiv’s military administration departments, also unnamed publicly, accusing him of drawing comparable documents for three men. Men between the ages of 18 and 60 have not been allowed to leave the country since the invasion, with narrow exceptions, but the State Border Guard says some are arrested every day for trying.

Some Western officials have voiced doubts about pouring money into Ukraine, a country that has long been notorious for official corruption. Mr. Zelensky has worked at sending the message that he is meeting the problem head-on.

Gaëlle Girbes reported from Pokrovsk, Ukraine, and Marc Santora from Kyiv, Ukraine. Victoria Kim contributed reporting from Seoul, and Gaya Gupta and Anushka Patil from New York.