KYIV (Reuters) – Russian drone attacks killed a 12-year-old girl in central Ukraine and wounded three people in the capital Kyiv overnight, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday.
One drone hit a residential building in Samarivskyi district in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine’s emergency service said.
Residents pulled the girl out of the rubble but she died on the way to the hospital, the service said. It posted photos of emergency workers sifting through wreckage.
There was no comment from Russia about the attacks. Moscow denies targeting civilians in the war that it started with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago.
“The Russian army again massively deployed drones to the region,” Dnipropetrovsk region governor Serhiy Lysak said on Telegram, adding that a 6-year-old girl and two adults were hurt in the attack.
The air force downed seven drones over the region, he added.
Another 47-year-old woman was hurt in the city of Nikopol, also in the Dnipropetrovsk region, a local official said.
Overall, Ukraine’s air force said Russia attacked Ukraine with 100 drones overnight, and air force units shot down 37 of them.
Emergency services were also called to Kyiv’s sprawling northeastern Desnianskyi district where debris from a destroyed drone sparked a fire at a recreation building, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
The head of Kyiv’s military administration, Timur Tkachenko, said that air defence systems were deployed just before 1 a.m. local time (2200 GMT on Monday).
Reuters’ reporters heard a series of blasts in the city.
Kyiv’s military administration said in a later post that three people sought medical assistance.
Last week, Russia pounded the Ukrainian capital with missiles and drones, killing 13 people and drawing a rare rebuke from U.S. President Donald Trump who said his administration was pressuring Russia to stop.
(Reporting by Valentyn Ogirenko in Kyiv, Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk; Editing by Chris Reese, Michael Perry and Andrew Heavens)
