UMAN, Ukraine: Russia hurled missiles at cities across Ukraine as people slept early on Friday (Apr 28), killing at least 17 people in the first large-scale air strikes in nearly two months.
Hours after the pre-dawn attacks, Kyiv said it was finishing preparations for a counteroffensive to try to take back territory occupied by Russian forces in 14 months of war.
In the central city of Uman, firefighters battled a raging blaze at a residential apartment building that had been struck on an upper floor. At least 15 people were killed in Uman, including two children, and nine people were taken to hospital, the regional governor said.
Rescue workers clambered through a huge pile of smouldering rubble, carrying out a body on a stretcher. A man wearing a face mask sobbed as he watched, and a woman came to comfort him.
“At first the windows were blown out, then came the explosion,” a resident of the apartment building, who gave her name only as Olga, said as rescue workers dug through the debris. “Everything flew out.”
In the south-eastern city of Dnipro, a missile struck a house, killing a two-year-old child and a 31-year-old woman, regional governor Serhiy Lysak said. Three people were also wounded in the attack.
“Rescuers will work until they make sure that no one else is left under the rubble,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter. “We can only defeat Russian terror together – with weapons for Ukraine, the toughest sanctions against the terrorist state, fair sentences for the Russian killers.”
The Ukrainian military said it had shot down 21 out of 23 cruise missiles fired by Russia.
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