An airstrike hit a residential district in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, killing a two-year-old girl and injuring 22 people, officials said yesterday.
The attack, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy blamed on Russia, partially destroyed a pair of two-story buildings as well as 10 private homes, a shop and a gas pipeline, the region’s governor said.
Russian airstrikes over Ukraine have ratcheted up in the past few weeks, as have incursions in the opposite direction.
Photo: Reuters
Kyiv has for months said it is preparing a major counteroffensive against Moscow’s occupation forces, hoping to reclaim territory lost since Russia invaded in February last year.
After Saturday’s strike, a girl’s body was pulled from the wreckage.
“At night, a girl’s body was retrieved from under the rubble of a house in the Pidhorodnenska community,” Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak posted on Telegram early yesterday.
“She just turned two,” he said.
“22 people were injured, 5 of them were children,” he added, after earlier saying that three boys were in serious condition.
Zelenskiy said that more people were trapped beneath the wreckage.
“The Russians attacked the city,” Zelenskiy wrote on Facebook on Saturday. “Once again, Russia proves it is a terrorist state. The Russians will bear responsibility for everything committed against our state and people.”
Video posted by Zelenskiy showed rescue workers searching the destroyed building, to the sound of industrial drills.
In Kyiv, the head of the local military administration said the capital’s air defenses repelled several missiles and drones.
“According to preliminary information, not a single aerial target reached the capital,” Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, wrote on Telegram yesterday.
“The air defense forces destroyed everything heading towards the city at long distance,” he said. “For the second night in a row, the residents of Kyiv did not hear the sounds of explosions overhead.”
On Saturday, Ukrainian shelling killed two people in Russia’s Belgorod, a border region that has been hit by repeated attacks this week, the local governor said.
Belgorod villages have been targeted by unprecedented shelling, and the latest deaths bring the overall toll there to seven this week.
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