Russia launched a barrage of drones and missiles at Ukraine overnight on Saturday, damaging infrastructure and killing at least seven people, including two children, in the northeast city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia launched 480 drones and 29 missiles targeting the energy sector and railway infrastructure across the country.
“There should be a response from partners to these savage strikes against life,” Zelensky said on the Telegram app.
“Russia has not abandoned its attempts to destroy Ukraine’s residential and critical infrastructure, and therefore support should continue,” Zelensky said, urging partners to continue air defence and weapons supplies.
Ukrainian air defence units shot down 453 drones and 19 missiles, the air force said. But nine missiles and 26 attack drones hit 22 sites, it said.
Missiles target residential building
Oleh Syniehubov, Kharkiv regional governor, said that the city of Kharkiv was targeted by both Russian drones and missiles, and seven people, including two children, were killed after a Russian ballistic missile slammed into a five-storey residential building.
“When we arrived here 20 minutes after the explosion, I thought I was going to have a stroke. I couldn’t string two words together, and my legs were buckling,” Hanna, a resident of the destroyed building, told Reuters.
“It’s good that I wasn’t there with my child and that my father was with me. It was ordinary people who lived there. What were they targeting?”
White smoke was rising from the ruins, and emergency workers carried a body in a black sack, Reuters TV footage from the site showed.
In Kharkiv, 15 people were also wounded, and 19 residential buildings were damaged by the Russian attacks, Syniehubov said.
Commercial and administrative buildings, electricity distribution lines, and cars were also hit, he said.
In Kyiv, three people were injured, and the heating was knocked out in 2,806 residential apartment buildings in four districts across the capital after Russian strikes hit an energy infrastructure facility, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.
The national grid operator Ukrenergo said that emergency power cuts were introduced in seven regions across the country following the Russian attacks.
Ukrainian officials said that Russia also attacked four railway stations and other railway infrastructure in central Ukraine and port infrastructure in the southern Odesa region, setting on fire containers with vegetable oil and damaging a grain warehouse.
