(Reuters) – An overnight Russian combined missile and drone attack triggered fires, smashed buildings and buried residents under rubble in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, killing nine people and injuring more than 70, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday.
Six children were reported to be among the injured.
“There has been destruction. The search is continuing for people under rubble,” the State Emergency Service wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
The most serious incident was at an apartment building destroyed in the Sviatoshynskyi district west of the city centre.
Pictures posted on Telegram showed rescue teams working with floodlights, moving cautiously through piles of rubble and clambering up ladders extended along the facades of buildings. Police were calling from apartment to apartment to determine whether residents were safe.
Rescue teams, the emergency service said, were operating at 13 sites in the capital with climbing specialists and sniffer dogs. Forty fires had broken out.
“Mobile telephones are heard ringing beneath rubble. The search will continue until it become clear that they have got everyone,” it said.
Fires had broken out in garages, administrative buildings and falling metal fragments had struck vehicles.
An air raid alert was in effect in the capital for six hours.
There was no comment from Russia.
The attacks come at a critical moment in the war, that began with Russia’s invasion in 2022, as both Kyiv and Moscow are under pressure from the United States to show progress towards a peace deal.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy clashed again on Wednesday on efforts to end the three-year-old war in Ukraine, with the U.S. leader chiding Zelenskiy for refusing to recognise Russia’s occupation of Crimea as part of a U.S. peace deal.
The Trump administration has threatened to walk away from seeking an end to the war unless Kyiv and Moscow agree to the U.S. peace deal.
“Yesterday’s Russian maximalist demands for Ukraine to withdraw from its regions, combined with these brutal strikes, show that Russia, not Ukraine, is the obstacle to peace. Moscow, not Kyiv, is where pressure should be applied,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said that apart from Kyiv and the surrounding region, seven other regions were under the “mass” attack.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city in the northeast, endured overnight waves of Russian missiles and drones, Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram.
Terekhov said the city was attacked 14 times with drones and 10 times with missiles. Multi-storey residential buildings, a city polyclinic, a school building, private yards, industrial enterprises, and a hotel complex were damaged and one person was hospitalised, he said.
There was also damage in Zhytomyr region, west of Kyiv, where emergency services said Russian forces launched a repeat strike on rescue teams attending a fire, injuring one worker.
Ukrainian state railway Ukrzaliznytsia said that railway infrastructure had come under attack and two railway workers were hurt.
In Kyiv and Kharkiv regions the shelling damaged technical track, administrative and technical buildings, but trains were operating normally.(This story has been refiled to fix a typo in the headline)
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Anna Pruchnicka; Editing by Chris Reese, Leslie Adler, Shri Navaratnam and Michael Perry)
