Rescuers completed a search for survivors on Tuesday after a Russian missile strike on a small Ukrainian city on Monday evening that was followed by another 37 minutes later, appearing to target emergency workers responding to the first attack.
The final toll, officials said, was seven people dead, including one rescuer, and 82 injured, including 38 emergency workers and two children. The attack devastated the city of Pokrovsk, which lies about 43 miles to the northwest of the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk and 30 miles from the front line.
After the second attack, the search for survivors was suspended overnight out of concern that there could be additional strikes on rescuers, according to Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. At least 12 multistory buildings, including a hotel, a prosecutor’s office, a pharmacy, shops and two cafes, were damaged, Ukrainian officials said.
By the time the rescue operations were complete on Tuesday, 122 tons of rubble had been removed from the city center, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that its forces had hit a command post of Ukrainian troops in the city, according to the Russian state news agency Tass, using the city’s older name, Krasnoarmeysk.
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.
Photos of the wreckage showed a five-story building with a chunk of the top floor missing and many of its window frames badly warped. Debris littered a children’s playground. An Italian restaurant called Corleone’s, a popular gathering place for volunteers and journalists traveling to the frontline, was left in ruins.
The successive attacks were devastating even for residents who had largely grown accustomed to living their daily lives miles from the front line. It appeared to be what Ukrainian officials called a “double-tap attack,” a tactic aimed at killing emergency workers or firefighters responding to the scene of an initial strike.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the regional military administration, said that authorities had received a warning about 10 minutes before the second missile hit, which helped prevent an even higher toll.
“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.
President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials praised the heroism of the emergency workers and mourned Andrii Omelchenko, the rescuer killed by the second missile.
Officials said that Mr. Omelchenko, 52, who was the deputy chief of Ukraine’s State Emergency Service in the region, “gave half of his life to service.”
Russian forces carried out another double-tap attack on Monday evening in a village in the Kupiansk district of the Kharkiv region, killing civilians and then injuring emergency crews who came to help, according to Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the regional administration.
At least two people were killed and nine others — four of whom were first responders — were injured, Mr. Sinegubov said.
Anushka Patil and Daniel Victor contributed reporting.
