Ukraine hit by Russia drone attack, 4 killed
Four people including a three-year-old child were killed and eight others wounded when a Russian drone hit an apartment block in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa on Saturday, authorities said.
At the scene, smoke poured from rubble strewn across the ground where the drone had ripped a several-storey sized chunk out of the building.
Clothes and furniture could be seen among the ruined mass of concrete and steel hanging off the side of the ruined apartment block.
“Russia continues to fight civilians ... One of the enemy drones hit a residential building in Odesa. Eighteen apartments were destroyed,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Telegram post.
Ukraine’s State Emergencies Service posted photos including of a dead toddler being placed in a body bag by rescuers.
“This is impossible to forget! This is impossible to forgive,” it wrote. It said five people including a child had been rescued alive.
According to Zelensky, the drone was a Shahed supplied by Iran. Russia has launched several thousand of these longrange winged drones throughout the war at targets deep inside Ukraine.
“My husband quickly ran out to help people ... then I saw people running out and I understood people had died in there,” said Svitlana Tkachenko, who lives in a neighbouring building.
Ukraine’s Armed Forces reported that the Odesa region was attacked by eight drones, of which seven were shot down by air defenses.
Across the country more widely, air defenses shot down 14 of 17 drones launched against Ukraine, according to the country’s Armed Forces.
Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Syniehubov reported Saturday morning that over 20 settlements in the eastern Ukrainian province had sustained Russian artillery and mortar attacks, while high-rise buildings in the regional capital, also called Kharkiv, were damaged by a drone attack.
He said that there were no casualties, but that three people suffered an “acute stress reaction.”
In Russia, a drone crashed into an apartment building in St. Petersburg Saturday morning, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
Six people received medical help after the explosion rocked the building, the agency said, citing the press service of the city’s health care committee.
The Mash news site said that the apartment building was hit by a Ukrainian drone. The Associated Press could not verify this claim.
The site published videos appearing to show the moment the apartment building was struck, showing a strong flash of light engulfing one side of the building and fragments of debris flying into the air. Another video showed car alarms going off.
Russia’s defence ministry has not commented on the incident.