An overnight Russian combined missile and drone attack triggered fires, smashed buildings and buried residents under rubble in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, killing nine people and injuring more than 70, the State Emergency Service said on Thursday.
Six children were reported to be among the injured.
“There has been destruction. The search is continuing for people under rubble,” the State Emergency Service wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
The most serious incident was at an apartment building destroyed in the Sviatoshynskyi district west of the city centre.
Pictures posted on Telegram showed rescue teams working with floodlights, moving cautiously through piles of rubble and clambering up ladders extended along the facades of buildings. Police were calling from apartment to apartment to determine whether residents were safe.
Rescue teams, the emergency service said, were operating at 13 sites in the capital with climbing specialists and sniffer dogs. Forty fires had broken out.
“Mobile telephones are heard ringing beneath rubble. The search will continue until it become clear that they have got everyone,” it said.
Fires had broken out in garages, administrative buildings and falling metal fragments had struck vehicles.
An air raid alert was in effect in the capital for six hours.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city in the northeast, endured two overnight waves of Russian missiles, injuring two people and smashing windows, Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram.
There was also damage in Zhytomyr region, west of Kyiv, where emergency services said Russian forces launched a repeat strike on rescue teams attending a fire, injuring one worker.
Ukrainian state railway Ukrzaliznytsia said that railway infrastructure had come under attack and two railway workers were hurt.
In Kyiv and Kharkiv regions the shelling damaged track and administrative and technical buildings, but trains were operating normally.
REUTERS
