KHARKIV, Ukraine (Reuters) -Russian drones struck apartment buildings in Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, injuring 32 people, including two children, sparking fires and forcing dozens of residents to flee their homes, regional officials said.
According to preliminary information, Russian forces launched 19 drones at the Slobidskyi, Osnovianskyi and Nemyslianskyi districts after midnight, regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said, adding that six of the wounded had been hospitalised.
Kharkiv, about 30 km (18 miles) from the Russian border, repelled Russian forces in the first weeks of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion and has since endured near-daily missile and drone strikes on residential districts and infrastructure.
Syniehubov said 48 people, including three children, were evacuated from the smoke-filled stairwell of a multi-storey building and that at least 10 civilian cars, a nearby residential house, garages, an office roof and a supermarket were damaged.
Photos released by Ukraine’s State Emergency Service showed the attack had torn open shopfronts and apartment blocks, with rescuers guiding injured residents past crumpled, still-smouldering cars and twisted metal scattered across a blackened courtyard.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said that a drone struck near a medical facility, injuring a doctor and damaging the building and nearby cars.
“I heard the Shahed (drone) getting closer … I was literally pushed into the hallway by the blast wave,” said Danilo Bondarev, a 22-year-old student who lives on the third floor of one of the damaged buildings.
“It’s just a residential area, there’s only a school and a kindergarten here, and there’s absolutely nothing else here.”
There was no immediate comment from Russia about the attacks.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war, but thousands have since died in the nearly four years of the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
(Reporting by Vitalii Hnidyi in Kharkiv, Oleksandr Kozhukhar in Kyiv, Ronald Popeski in Winnipeg and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne;Writing by Ron Popeski and Lidia Kelly; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Raju Goplalakrishnan)
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