Twenty-Four Killed in Ukraine, Eighteen in One Apartment Block
Russia fired seventy ballistic missiles and forty-six jet-powered drones at eleven Ukrainian regions overnight, killing at least twenty-four people. Eighteen of them, four of them children, died in a single five-storey apartment block in Pryluky in the Chernihiv region. Volodymyr Zelensky called it among Russia’s “most vile” attacks and said the timing was chosen.
Mr Zelensky named the dead, among them a one-year-old called Serhii and an eight-year-old called Maksym, and said Russia had “presented” Vladimir Putin with “the destruction of a residential block in Pryluky” for his seventy-fourth birthday: “The Russians know very well that they are striking ordinary cities, ordinary life. It is an absolutely deliberate choice of terror.” Ukraine’s air force says it brought down more than 80% of the drones, against an average nearer 50 to 60%. About fifty people were injured, children among them, and two were killed in Kyiv, where BBC Verify authenticated images of an unexploded Iskander lying on open ground ringed by tower blocks. The same campaign is now reaching well beyond Ukraine’s borders. Bulgaria has ended its search for the crew of a cargo ship sunk by a drone about 150km east of Byala, outside its territorial waters: “There is no trace of the sailors,” said Rumen Nikolov, who co-ordinated the operation. Eighteen Turkish and Indian crew were rescued from a second vessel that caught fire, and no drone debris has been recovered. Rumen Radev called the attack “absolutely unacceptable” and Ursula von der Leyen condemned it. A separate ship sank off Romania on Monday, killing two. The toll was still rising as rescuers worked. Mr Zelensky had warned the day before that intelligence pointed to a massive strike coming, and it could not be stopped: without ammunition for its American-made Patriot systems Ukraine cannot intercept ballistic missiles, and Patriots are scarce because of the war with Iran. That is the thread tying this to the rest of tonight’s page.