Kyiv: A Russian missile attack on the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Monday killed at least four people, including a 10-year-old girl and her mother, and buried several others under rubble, Ukrainian officials said.
A video posted by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy showed smoke billowing from a gaping hole smashed in the side of a nine-storey residential building, and another four-storey building almost levelled.
“Tragic news. Four people have already died in Kryvyi Rih,” Serhiy Lysak, the regional governor, wrote on the Telegram messenger app. Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul said they included a 10-year-old girl and her 45-year-old mother.
Zelenskiy, who grew up in the steel-producing city with a pre-war population of more than 600,000, said the strikes had hit a residential building and a university building.
“This terror will not frighten us or break us. We are working and saving our people,” he said on the Telegram app.
More than 200 rescuers were trying to save people trapped under the rubble. Vilkul said there could be as many as eight.
Emergency services said at least 43 people had been wounded. Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said the attack appeared to have been carried out with ballistic missiles.
Kherson, now a frontline city in southern Ukraine after being liberated from Russian forces in November, was struck at least twice.
An early morning rocket attack killed a 60-year-old utility worker and wounded four others as they were out on the street doing their jobs, the regional military administration said.
A 65-year-old man driving his car was badly wounded in the second strike and died as an acquaintance tried to rush him to hospital, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Anna Pruchnicka; writing by Tom Balmforth; editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Alex Richardson, Philippa Fletcher and Kevin Liffey)
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