Russian missile strike on Pryluky kills at least nine people
A Russian missile hit a high-rise residential building in Pryluky, Chernihiv region, killing at least nine people, including three children, and injuring 38. Several other Ukrainian cities were also hit overnight.
On the morning of 7 October, a Russian missile struck a multi-storey residential building in Pryluky, in Ukraine's Chernihiv region. According to regional police, by 11:30 the death toll had reached nine, with 38 people injured, seven of them children. The bodies of three children were found under the rubble of the apartment block. Police had initially reported four dead and 20 injured.
Search and rescue work is continuing, as more people may be trapped beneath the debris. Nina Lutsenko, a spokeswoman for the State Emergency Service in the Chernihiv region, said three people had been rescued, including one child. Among the injured are five children aged three, five, eight and nine, as well as a police officer.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the building was an ordinary five-storey block and stressed that the attack came on Vladimir Putin's birthday. He described it as one of the most cowardly attacks and said Russia wanted to deliver a painful, demonstrative blow, with Ukraine's energy sector among its main targets.
Damage elsewhere in Ukraine
Missile strikes also damaged five more apartment buildings in Dnipro and four high-rises in Kremenchuk, in the Poltava region, where two people were killed and eight injured. A drone attack damaged a high-rise in Zaporizhzhia. Two people were killed in Kyiv and two more in Oleksandriia, in the Kirovohrad region. In total, infrastructure in Kyiv and 12 regions came under attack overnight.
Scale of the attack
Ukraine's Air Force reports that Russia used a variety of missiles, including ballistic and cruise types, as well as 130 attack drones and decoys. Air defences shot down or neutralised five ballistic missiles and 39 cruise missiles, as well as 117 drones, 38 of them jet-powered.
Zelensky stressed that air defence systems are vitally needed and said Ukraine is constantly seeking missiles for its Patriot systems.
