UKRAINE declared a day’s mourning today after seven civilians, including three children, were killed in a Russian missile attack on Vilniansk in the south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region.

Governor Ivan Fedorov said the strike damaged unspecified “critical infrastructure” as well as a shop and residential buildings. Zaporizhzhia is one of the Ukrainian regions Moscow has formally annexed, although the front line runs through it and its capital city remains in Ukrainian hands.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky renewed calls for more long-range weaponry from the United States, saying it would enable his forces to destroy Russian missile-launching systems.

But the US has expressed concern about Ukraine’s choice of targets when using such weapons, with officials briefing the Washington Post in May that the White House was unhappy with a strike on one of Russia’s nuclear-warning systems, saying damaging Moscow’s ability to accurately detect incoming ballistic missiles raised the risk of misunderstandings that could lead to nuclear war.

Last week, Russia blamed the US directly after US-supplied missiles were used in a strike on Sebastopol in disputed Crimea that killed four people, including two children. It said the missiles could not have been targeted without US oversight, something Washington denies.

Russia and Ukraine both reported shelling and drone attacks on each other’s territory today, but 10 Ukrainians who had been held in Russian detention were returned home in a deal brokered by the Vatican.

Those released included Crimean Tatar separatists, two Catholic priests of Ukraine’s Uniate Greek-liturgy confession and an art historian who had been imprisoned for treason against the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, which has since been annexed to the Russian Federation.