The death toll from a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro has risen to 40, the national emergencies service said on January 16.
Dnipro’s municipal council also said 75 people had been injured in the strike in the city, just one of several Ukrainian cities targeted by Russian missiles — but by far the deadliest attack — on January 14.
“The search-and-rescue operation in the Dnipro has been continuing for almost 40 hours,” Valentyn Reznichenko, the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration, said on January 16.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy spoke directly to the Russian people in his nightly video address: “Your cowardly silence, your attempt to ‘wait out’ what is happening, will end only with the fact that one day these same terrorists will come for you,” he said, speaking in Russian.
Earlier, the city council declared three days of mourning for what it described as the worst “terrorist attack on Dnipro” since the launch of Russia’s full invasion last February.
Rescuers used a crane to try to evacuate people trapped in the apartment building’s upper stories, some of whom were signaling with the flashlights on their mobile phones, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, said on Telegram on January 14. He also said more people were likely buried under the rubble.
The Ukrainian military has said it believes the nine-story structure was hit by a long-range Kh-22 missile. As a result of the strike, the entire entrance of the building, in which more than 1,100 people lived, collapsed.
Russia carried out three air raids, 57 missile attacks, and 69 attacks from heavy weapon rocket salvo systems on January 14, Ukraine’s military command reported on January 15.
Dnipro was just one of several Ukrainian cities targeted by Russian missiles on January 14 in the first major barrage in days.
Infrastructure facilities were also hit in the western Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, in the Odesa region on the Black Sea, and in northeastern Kharkiv. Kyiv, the capital, was also targeted.
According to Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat, Russia attacked Kyiv with ballistic missiles flying from the north.
Source : Radio Free Europe
