The death toll from a Russian missile strike on a residential building in Pryluky, northern Ukraine, has risen to 22, including five children, as rescuers continue searching the rubble.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said 54 people were injured in the attack on Wednesday in the Chernihiv region, including seven children. Fifteen survivors, among them a child, were pulled from the wreckage shortly after the strike.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said a cruise missile had directly hit the building in Pryluky, about 150km east of Kyiv.
The strike was part of a large Russian missile and drone barrage targeting Kyiv and 12 other regions. The attack coincided with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 74th birthday.
“This is the kind of ‘gift’ Putin gave himself for his birthday,” Mr Zelenskiy said in a nightly video address. “The killing of children, the killing of people.”
He warned that Russia was likely to intensify daily missile and drone attacks as winter approached.
Ukraine’s energy company DTEK said the national grid operator Ukrenergo had ordered emergency power cuts in Kyiv. It said the measures were separate from regular rolling outages scheduled across the country and would not be imposed during those shutdowns.
Further drone strikes hit Kyiv
Russian drones later struck Kyiv’s Obolonskyi and Desnianskyi districts, police said.
In Obolonskyi, north of central Kyiv, a drone hit a courtyard between apartment buildings, killing two people and injuring seven. Those hurt included a 12-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl.
In Desnianskyi, on the capital’s north-eastern outskirts, another drone hit a residential building. Two women were killed and five people injured, including girls aged one and six.
Russia and Ukraine remain engaged in a long-range aerial war while their armies are largely deadlocked along the front line, more than four and a half years after Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
