At least nine people have been killed in a Russian attack on Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, its governor says.

Ivan Fedorov said the strike on Friday set a car garage and service station on fire.

“Nine dead and six wounded,” Fedorov said in a post on Telegram alongside images of a fire blazing with debris strewn across a street.

He added that two children, aged four and 11, were among those hurt.

The attack comes after weeks of escalation in the nearly three-year war in Ukraine, where Moscow has stepped up its strikes at the start of winter.

The Russian military also struck the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Friday, the local governor said, killing at least two people.

The state emergency services agency said at least 16 others were wounded, including a child, while rescuers were searching for one missing person.

“A three-storey building was destroyed, residential buildings and cars were damaged,” the agency said on Telegram.

Kryvyi Rih, located about 80km (50 miles) from the front lines in southern Ukraine, has been targeted frequently by Russian aerial strikes since the country’s 2022 invasion of its neighbour.

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Friday’s attacks came as Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, in Belarus’s capital of Minsk, where the two leaders signed a mutual defence pact.

Speaking alongside Lukashenko, Putin emphasised the new agreement includes the potential use of Russian tactical nuclear weapons deployed to Belarus in response to an aggression.

Russia also could deploy its newly developed hypersonic Oreshnik missiles in Belarus in 2025 as it begins to ramp up production, the Russian president said.

Moscow unveiled the nuclear-capable weapon last month in a strike on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, sharply escalating tensions.

“As for the possibility of deploying, to put it bluntly, such formidable weapons as Oreshnik on Belarusian territory, … it will become possible, I think, in the second half of next year,” Putin said on Friday.

Russia had already deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in 2023.

Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly said such weapons deployed to Belarus remain under Moscow’s control, but the secretary of Belarus’s Security Council, Alexander Volfovich, said on Friday that their use would require Lukashenko’s approval.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the recent use of the Oreshnik medium-range missile in Ukraine sought to make the West understand that Moscow was ready to use “any means” to stave off defeat.

The Oreshnik launch on November 21 came after Ukraine carried out strikes against Russian military facilities in the Bryansk and Kursk regions with Western-supplied weapons.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called Russia’s use of Oreshnik “the latest bout of Russian madness” and appealed to allies for updated air defence systems to meet the new threat.

Hypersonic missiles travel at speeds of at least Mach 5 – five times the speed of sound – and can manoeuvre mid-flight, making them harder to track and intercept.