REUTERS, Kyiv

A woman was killed early yesterday when Russian forces shelled the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, while two other people were killed in Russian shelling of border areas of the Kharkiv region in northeast Ukraine, officials said.

Both the city of Kherson and parts of the Kharkiv region are directly adjacent to the front line. The Ukrainian military has reported increased Russian attacks in the Kharkiv region in recent days.

“A difficult night for Kherson ... The Russian army continued to shell Kherson residents’ homes in the central part of the city,” governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on the Telegram messaging app.

Prokudin said the shelling had started around midnight and lasted for several hours.

Separately, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, said on Telegram that two civilians had been killed and three others wounded during Russian shelling of border areas of Kharkiv region yesterday morning.

Ukraine recaptured Kherson city and parts of the Kherson region in November after months of Russian occupation, but Russian forces regularly shell the city and surrounding areas from across the Dnipro River.

This month a doctor was killed and five medical workers were wounded in Russian shelling of a Kherson hospital.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday Ukraine is seeing “significant results” from US and German air defence systems, despite waves of Russian air strikes.

The Moscow-appointed head of Crimea said the Chonhar bridge to the peninsula, which was annexed from Ukraine by Moscow in 2014, had been damaged by a missile strike. Another of the three road links between Crimea and Russian-occupied parts of mainland Ukraine, near the town of Henichesk, was shelled and a civilian driver wounded, a Moscow-appointed official said.

In his nightly video address on Sunday, Zelensky said advanced air defence systems, including the US-built Patriot and Germany’s IRIS-T, were proving “highly effective” and had “already yielded significant results.”