Kyiv (Reuters) – Russian missiles hit an apartment building and a kindergarten complex in central Kyiv on Sunday, killing one person and wounding six, officials said, as Moscow stepped up air strikes on Ukraine for a second day. .
Emergency services said firefighters put out a fire in a heavily damaged nine-storey apartment building in the central Shevchenkivsky district. Debris was scattered over cars parked outside a burning building with a hole in its roof.
“They (rescuers) have taken out a seven-year-old girl. She is alive. Now they are trying to save her mother,” Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
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“There are people under the rubble,” Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app. He added that many people were taken to hospital.
Deputy Mayor Mykola Povoroznik later updated the death toll to one person killed and at least six wounded, and said the rocket landed near the site of a similar attack in late April.
About 400 meters away, a Reuters photographer saw a large new crater next to the playground of a private kindergarten whose windows were smashed. Some privately owned storage garages in the area were completely destroyed.
The deputy mayor told national television that explosions were heard in other parts of Kyiv on Sunday, but that these were the sounds of air defense smashing further strikes coming.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow, which denies targeting civilians.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it used high-precision weapons to strike Ukrainian army training centers in the Chernihiv, Zhytomyr and Lviv regions, apparently referring to the strikes reported by Ukraine on Saturday. Read more
On Sunday, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force said that between four and six long-range missiles were fired from Russian launchers more than 1,000 km away in the southern Russian region of Astrakhan, bordering the Caspian Sea.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the Group of Seven nations, at a three-day summit, should respond to the attack by tightening sanctions on Russia and providing more heavy weapons to Ukraine. Read more
The last major strike on Kyiv was on June 5 when a railway car repair facility in its suburbs was hit. In late April, a Radio Liberty producer was killed in a raid that hit the building she lived in. read more
The historic Shevchenkivskiy district is home to an array of universities, restaurants, and art galleries.
Russia abandoned an early advance toward Kyiv in the face of fierce resistance backed by Western weapons.
Since then, Moscow and its proxies have focused on the south and Donbass, an eastern region made up of Luhansk and its neighbor Donetsk, and have deployed crushing artillery in some of the fiercest ground battles in Europe since World War II. Read more
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(Reporting by Pavel Politiuk, Valentin Ogirenko, Alessandra Prentice); Writing by Lydia Kelly and Tom Palmforth; Editing by Michael Perry, David Clarke and Toby Chopra
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