The death toll at a residential building hit by a Russian missile in the northern Ukrainian town of Pryluky has risen to 22, including five children, as rescuers search through the rubble.
The strike on Wednesday in the country's Chernihiv region also injured 54 people, seven of them children, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
In the immediate aftermath, rescuers pulled 15 survivors out, including a child.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said a cruise missile directly hit the building, some 150 km east of Kyiv, the country's capital.
The strike was part of a massive Russian missile and drone barrage on Kyiv and a dozen other regions on Wednesday, coinciding with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 74th birthday.
“This is the kind of ‘gift’ Putin gave himself for his birthday,” Zelenskiy said in a nightly video address.
“The killing of children, the killing of people.”
Zelenskiy warned Russia would likely escalate daily missile and drone attacks as winter approached.
Ukraine's energy company DTEK said the national grid operator Ukrenergo had ordered emergency power outages in Kyiv, and explained that this was separate from regular, rolling outages scheduled across the country and would not be applied during those shutdowns.
Russia and Ukraine are locked in a long-range aerial war while their armies remain largely deadlocked on the front line, more than four-and-a-half years since Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Late on Wednesday, Russian drones struck Kyiv’s Obolonskyi and Desnianskyi districts, police said.
In Obolonskyi, north of central Kyiv, a drone hit a courtyard between apartment buildings, killing two people and injuring seven, including a 12-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl.
In Desnianskyi, on the capital’s northeastern outskirts, a drone hit a residential building, killing two women and injuring five, among them girls aged 1 and 6.
