KHARKIV (Reuters) -A concentrated, nine-minute-long Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv in the middle of the night killed at least two people and injured 57, including seven children, regional officials said on Wednesday.
The intense strikes with 17 drones sparked fires in 15 units of a five-storey apartment building and caused other damage in the city close to the Russian border, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said.
“There are direct hits on multi-storey buildings, private homes, playgrounds, enterprises and public transport,” Terekhov said on the Telegram messaging app.
“Apartments are burning, roofs are destroyed, cars are burnt, windows are broken.”
A Reuters witness saw emergency rescuers helping to carry people out of damaged buildings and administering care, while firefighters battled blazes in the dark.
Nine of the injured, including a 2-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy, have been hospitalised, Oleh Sinehubov, the governor of the broader Kharkiv region, said on Telegram.
He added that the strikes hit also a city trolley bus depot and several residential buildings.
The Ukrainian military said Russia had launched 85 drones overnight, 40 of which were shot down.
It said nine drones were lost – a reference to the Ukrainian military using electronic warfare to redirect them – or they were drone simulators that did not carry warheads.
“The main areas of the air strike are Kharkiv, Donetsk and Odesa regions,” the military said on Telegram.
There was no immediate comment from Russia. Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast, withstood Russia’s full-scale advance in the early days of the war and has since been a frequent target of drone, missile, and guided aerial bomb assaults.
The overnight attack followed Russia’s two biggest assaults of the war on Ukraine this week, a part of intensified bombardments that Moscow said were retaliatory measures for Kyiv’s recent attacks in Russia.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched on its smaller neighbour in February 2022. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
“We are holding on. We are helping each other. And we will definitely survive,” Terekhov said. “Kharkiv is Ukraine. And it cannot be broken.”
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Chris Reese and Lincoln Feast.)
