The presidential deputy chief of staff Kyrylo Tymoshenko said a barrage of 28 rocket strikes had damaged a hospital and homes in several parts of the Mykolaiv region.

“There were also artillery strikes in the Vitovsk district and according to preliminary information five civilians were killed,” he said.

The Mykolaiv region governor Vitaly Kim said earlier today that several villages were shelled during the night without casualties.

Russia’s defence ministry said in a briefing it had targeted Mykolaiv with “high-precision surface-to-air missiles”, claiming to have killed dozens of soldiers east of the city.

A coastal city with an estimated pre-war population of around 475,000 residents, Mykolaiv lies between Ukraine’s largest port of Odessa and Kherson, a city seized by Russian troops early into the February invasion.