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At least 32 people, including children, were killed in a wave of Russian missile and drone strikes across Ukraine on Wednesday, damaging industrial and energy infrastructure, Ukrainian officials said.
The heaviest casualties were reported in the northern Chernihiv region, where a Russian missile destroyed a five-storey residential building in the city of Pryluky.
Ukraine’s emergency service said on Thursday morning that the death toll in Pryluky had risen to 22. Five children were among those killed, officials said.
In Kyiv, two more bodies were recovered from an apartment building damaged in a Russian airstrike, bringing the capital’s death toll to four.
Earlier, Interior Minister Ivan Vyhovsky had put the nationwide death toll at 28, including 20 people killed in Pryluky.
Two other people were killed on the outskirts of Kyiv by debris from a drone, prosecutors said on Wednesday evening.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said about 100 people were wounded across the country.
Zelenskyy said Russia had launched 70 missiles overnight, many of them high-speed ballistic missiles, along with dozens of Shahed attack drones.
He called the strikes one of Russia’s most “heinous” attacks on Ukraine, saying the assault appeared to have been timed to coincide with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s birthday.
In a video message, Zelenskyy said Putin’s “birthday present” to himself was the killing of children and other people.
He also said civilians were killed in attacks on Kyiv and the central Ukrainian cities of Oleksandriia and Kremenchuk.
