Another Early Morning Attack in Kyiv Kills 3

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia targeted the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, yet again with a missile attack in the early hours of Thursday, killing two women and a child who were not able to get into a closed shelter. Loud explosions were heard just minutes after air-raid sirens sounded throughout the city, waking residents worn out by a month of relentless attacks.

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said on the Telegram messaging app that an additional 16 people were injured by debris from air defense systems shooting down incoming attacks. Ukraine’s general staff headquarters said Kyiv had been attacked by a volley of 10 Iskander ballistic missiles, all of which were shot down.

The city’s military administration said some of the debris fell on a clinic and an adjacent building. A mother and child were killed minutes after the air-raid alert while trying to get into a bomb shelter at the clinic that was locked, according to Mr. Klitschko and two emergency workers at the scene who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the news media. The woman and her child were not immediately identified.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his nightly address, was sharply critical of local officials for failing to ensure all bomb shelters were open when sirens sounded. The people responsible for the locked shelter door should be prosecuted, he said.

“Never again should a situation like this night in Kyiv, when people came to the shelter, and the shelter is closed, happen,” he said. “It is the duty of local authorities — a very specific duty — to ensure the availability and availability of shelters 24 hours a day. It is painful to see a careless attitude toward this duty. It hurts to see losses.”

City officials said they had opened a criminal investigation into the clinic and the administrators responsible for operating the shelter there, focused on whether the shelter was properly maintained and why it may have been inaccessible, Mr. Klitschko said. Police officers will now patrol bomb shelters during air raids to make sure they are open, he added.

Later in the day, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said four people had been detained in connection with the incident: the first deputy of Kyiv’s Desnyansky district, the director and deputy director of the clinic, and a security guard.

A man who lives near the clinic and who gave his name as Yaroslav told the Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne that his 33-year-old wife, Natalya, was also killed after she and their 9-year-old daughter, Polina, were unable to get into the shelter.

Yaroslav said people were trying desperately to get in. “People were knocking, knocking for a very long time,” he said, adding, “There were women and children and nobody opened it.”

After what he described as an explosion, Yaroslav found Natalya bleeding alongside a blanket she brought for their daughter and a blue bag carrying family documents, according to the Suspilne report. His daughter, who was not injured, saw what happened to her mother, Yaroslav said.

While Kyiv has been attacked since the first days of the war, the pace and intensity of the Russian assaults over the past month have been jarring even for civilians now accustomed to spending hours in bomb shelters and sleepless nights huddled in corridors. Thursday’s strikes seemed to suggest that the campaign would continue into June.

Andrew E. Kramer and Nicole Tung reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Victoria Kim from Seoul. Marc Santora contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Juston Jones and Anushka Patil from New York. Dmitriy Khavin contributed translation.