A Russian missile struck an apartment building in the Ukrainian port of Mykolaiv early on Tuesday.

A Reuters witness said the latest strike on a city hours after the U.S. warned that it would hold Russia accountable for war crimes.

The missile, which caused one of three explosions heard in the southern city in the early hours of Tuesday, destroyed one wing of the building in the downtown area, leaving a massive crater.

A fire crew pulled the dead body of a man from the rubble, the witness said.

Monday brought Russian strikes on the capital Kyiv and other cities, where at least four people were killed, the second wave of air strikes in a week.

The Russian strikes followed advances by Ukrainian forces in the east and south after an October 8 blast on a bridge linking mainland Russia to Crimea.

“Right now, there is a new Russian drone attack,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Monday evening video address. “There are (drones) that have been shot down.”

The Interfax Ukraine news agency said Telegram users had reported blasts in the town of Fastiv outside Kyiv and in the southern port of Odesa.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the White House “strongly condemns Russia’s missile strikes” and said the attack continued to demonstrate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutality.

Mr Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on February 24 in a “special operation” to root out dangerous nationalists.

(Reuters/NAN)