Russia fired 70 missiles and dozens of drones overnight, Ukraine’s president said, with 20 dead in the northern town of Pryluky, five of them children.
At least 28 people, including children, were killed across Ukraine on Wednesday when Russia launched waves of missiles and drones in what President Volodymyr Zelensky called one of its most “vile strikes”.
Ukraine’s interior minister, Ivan Vyhivskyi, gave the nationwide death toll. Zelensky said 100 people were injured, and the attack also damaged industrial sites and energy infrastructure.
The deadliest strike hit Pryluky, in the northern Chernihiv region, where a Russian missile destroyed a five-storey residential building.
Vyacheslav Chaus, the regional governor, said 20 people were killed in the attack, five of them children. Regional officials said about 55 people were wounded in the town.
Zelensky said civilians were also killed in Kyiv and in the central cities of Oleksandria and Kremenchuk.
On Wednesday evening, prosecutors in Kyiv said falling debris from a drone had killed two people in a suburb of the capital.
Zelensky noted that the attack fell on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 74th birthday.
“This is the kind of birthday present that Putin gave himself: the killing of children, the killing of people,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address.
In comments online earlier in the day, he said Russia had fired 70 missiles at Ukraine overnight, many of them high-velocity ballistic missiles, along with dozens of Shahed attack drones.
“The Russians wanted to strike painfully and demonstratively,” he said. “This was one of the most vile strikes.”
In Pryluky, an excavator and dozens of rescuers with shovels worked through the debris where several sections of the apartment block had collapsed, according to Reuters, which had a reporter in the town.
Emergency workers climbed ladders to reach the upper floors of what remained of the building. They brought out 15 survivors as they worked their way down.
“There’s a lot of destruction, especially in the town centre,” Danylo Savenko, Pryluky’s deputy mayor, said in comments reported by Reuters.
Savenko said he ran to an air raid shelter with his wife as soon as he heard the missiles.
Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had carried out a “massive strike” on military-industrial facilities in Kyiv and other regions. It said it used high-precision weapons launched from land, sea and air, as well as drones.
The ministry said its targets included sites where the Ukrainian defence company Fire Point makes and stores its Flamingo cruise missiles and medium- and long-range drones. It named locations in Kyiv and in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava and Kharkiv regions.
Last week, Zelensky said Ukraine had fired its first domestically produced ballistic missile in combat, a weapon made by Fire Point.
In an interview with Reuters, Zelensky said he expected the company to have a longer-range missile, the FP-9, ready in the autumn. Fire Point has said the FP-9 will be able to reach Moscow.
Ukraine’s air force said it shot down just over 80% of the 46 jet-powered drones Russia launched. In recent weeks, air defences had been stopping 50% to 60% of them.
Since the summer, Russia has sent growing numbers of these high-velocity drones in round-the-clock attacks on Kyiv and other cities, and Ukraine’s air defences have struggled to cope.
Zelensky said Russian ballistic missiles remained Ukraine’s biggest challenge. He said he and his team were “every day looking for Patriot systems that can and must protect people’s lives”.
The US-made Patriot is the only system in Ukraine’s arsenal that can stop high-velocity ballistic missiles. Global supplies have been drained by the Iran war and the war in Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Ukraine received a new €1.2bn tranche of funding from the European Union. Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi said the money would go towards defence.
Zelensky said Ukrainian forces struck four targets in Russia over the previous 24 hours, including two oil facilities and a training ground, in the Perm, Samara and Astrakhan regions.
In his interview with Reuters, Zelensky said Ukraine would hit Russia’s energy assets in response to Moscow’s escalating attacks on civilian infrastructure.
In the Russian-controlled part of the southern Kherson region, the Moscow-installed governor said a Ukrainian drone killed two civilians in a car.
Russian-installed officials in occupied parts of the eastern Donetsk region said three people died in Ukrainian attacks.
Ukrainian officials and military intelligence had warned of a large attack in advance, and many Kyiv residents spent the night in the city’s metro stations.