Death toll from Russian missile strike reaches 45
DNIPRO, Ukraine — The death toll from the Ukraine war’s deadliest attack on civilians since last spring, a weekend Russian missile strike on a southeastern apartment building, has reached 45, officials said Tuesday.
Those killed in the Saturday afternoon strike in Dnipro included six children, with 79 people injured, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on the Telegram messaging app. The toll included two dozen people initially listed as missing at the multistory building, which housed about 1,700, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office.
Emergency crews cleared some 9.9 tons of rubble during a nonstop search and rescue operation, the Dnipro City Council said. About 400 people lost their homes, with 72 apartments completely ruined and another 236 damaged beyond repair, it added.
People converged at the site Tuesday to lay flowers, light candles and bring plush toys. For a third day in a row, Dnipro resident Oleksandr Pohorielov came to mourn.
“It’s like coming to the cemetery to your family. It’s a memory, to say a proper goodbye. To remain a human after all,” he explained as an intense reek of burning emanated from the building’s ruins.
Volunteers helped Nadiia Yaroshenko’s son escape from their third floor apartment on a makeshift ladder but their white cat Beliash refused to leave. He remains in his favorite place at a window that is now blown out, Yaroshenko said, desperately trying to see him from the courtyard with a flashlight.
“We cannot reach the apartment even with rescuers because the apartment is in an emergency and dangerous condition. Walls could collapse there every minute,” she said.
The latest deadly Russian strike on a civilian target in the almost 11-month war triggered outrage. It also prompted the surprise resignation Tuesday of a Ukrainian presidential adviser who had said the Russian missile exploded and fell after the Ukrainian air defense system shot it down, a version that would take some of the blame off the Kremlin’s forces.
Oleksii Arestovych’s comments in a Saturday night interview caused an outcry. He said as he quit that his remarks were “a fundamental mistake.” Ukraine’s air force had stressed that the country’s military did not possess a system capable of downing Russia’s Kh-22 supersonic missiles, the type that hit the apartment building.