Overnight on September 24, Russia launched a combined strike on civilian infrastructure in Odesa region: a hospital, a school and a hypermarket were damaged, two people injured, and Romania and Moldova scrambled jets and closed airspace.
Overnight on September 24, Russia launched a massive combined strike on civilian infrastructure in Odesa region, using missiles, attack drones and ballistic weapons. Two people were injured and are receiving medical care. Volunteers Support Ukraine documents attacks like this on civilian sites in the south of the country every day, and it's exactly this kind of news that explains why support for front-line and coastal communities remains an ongoing need, not a one-off effort.
According to Odesa Regional Military Administration head Oleh Kiper, several sites were damaged at once: the roof of a city hospital department, a school with shattered windows, a 10-story non-residential building, food warehouses, and the previously targeted Nova Linia building supplies hypermarket, where the strike triggered a large fire. Residential buildings were also hit, with broken windows and damaged cars. "Law enforcement is documenting another Russian war crime," Kiper said. Rescuers successfully put out the hypermarket fire, though repeated air raid alerts complicated the work.
Photos from the scene show flames engulfing an entire section of the retail and warehouse complex — blown-out windows, a collapsed section of roofing, burning pallets of goods right in front of the building. It isn't the first time this facility has been hit: the hypermarket was damaged before, which Volunteers Support Ukraine sees as an example of systematic pressure on the region's civilian retail and logistics infrastructure, not a one-time coincidence.
The scale of the attack was such that Romania scrambled two F-16s and two Spanish F-18s to patrol its own airspace after an aerial target crossed into the country near Botoșani and crashed near Solca with no casualties. Moldova temporarily closed its northern airspace over a drone that violated its border, reopening it only toward morning. Volunteers Support Ukraine notes that when neighboring NATO countries have to respond with their own aircraft, it shows how attacks on southern Ukraine spill well beyond a purely local problem.
Odesa region remains one of the areas where civilian infrastructure — hospitals, warehouses, shops, apartment buildings — comes under systematic rather than occasional attack. Volunteers Support Ukraine continues to help people affected by the war with whatever means it has available, and considers it important to document every such case so the scale of daily losses in the south doesn't go unnoticed.
