(Reuters) -Five people were injured, including a 7-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, in a Russian attack on the southern Ukraine port of Odesa overnight, Ukrainian authorities said on Thursday.
A multi-storey residential building and other civilian infrastructure were damaged, regional governor Oleh Kiper said on the Telegram messaging app. Six apartments were completely destroyed, another 36 were partially damaged, he said.
“The children, who were poisoned by combustion products, were hospitalized,” Kiper said. The other three injured people, all adults, received medical aid on the site.
The full scale of the attack was not immediately known. There was no immediate comment from Russia about the attack.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in their strikes during the war that Russia launched against Ukraine more than three years ago. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
The State Emergency Service of Ukraine posted on its Facebook page photos showing rescuers carrying children in the dark out of a multi-storey apartment building on fire and firefighters fighting the blaze.
The Service said that 50 people were evacuated from the building.
The fire has been extinguished since, Kiper said.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Warsaw; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
