The death toll from a Russian cruise missile strike on an apartment building in Pryluky, Ukraine, has risen to 22, including five children, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported Thursday as rescuers continued pulling bodies from the rubble.
The strike hit Wednesday in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region, roughly 93 miles east of Kyiv. It injured 54 people, seven of them children. Rescuers pulled 15 survivors from the wreckage in the immediate aftermath, including one child.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a cruise missile hit the building directly.
The attack on Pryluky was one piece of a much larger assault. Russia launched a massive missile and drone barrage against Kyiv and a dozen other Ukrainian regions on Wednesday. The timing was pointed: the strikes coincided with Vladimir Putin’s 74th birthday.
“This is the kind of ‘gift’ Putin gave himself for his birthday,” Zelensky said in his nightly address. “The killing of children, the killing of people.”
Zelensky said he expects Russia to escalate daily missile and drone strikes as winter sets in.
Kyiv also hit overnight
Late Wednesday, Russian drones struck two districts of the capital. In Obolonskyi, north of central Kyiv, a drone hit a courtyard between apartment buildings, killing two people and injuring seven, including a 12-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl.
In Desnianskyi, on Kyiv’s northeastern outskirts, a drone struck a residential building, killing two women. Five others were hurt, including two young girls, ages 1 and 6.
The barrage forced Ukraine’s grid operator, Ukrenergo, to order emergency power outages in Kyiv. Energy company DTEK said those cuts are separate from the rolling blackouts already scheduled nationwide and will not overlap with them.
More than four and a half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, the two countries remain locked in a grinding war of long-range missiles and drones even as their ground forces stay largely deadlocked along the front line.
