Russian missile tears through a Pryluky apartment block as an overnight barrage on Putin’s birthday kills at least 19 across Ukraine

A Russian missile and drone attack on Ukrainian cities overnight into Wednesday killed at least 19 people, most of them in a five-storey apartment building in the northern city of Pryluky, Ukrainian officials said. The toll of 19 included 14 people in Pryluky and two in Kyiv, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported; officials also reported two deaths each in Kremenchuk and Oleksandriia, and BBC News and the Kyiv Post put the national toll at 20. The attack came on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 74th birthday.

In Pryluky, about 150 kilometres east of Kyiv in the Chernihiv region, which borders Russia, rescuers said the strike killed 14 people, including four children, and injured 50, seven of them children. Emergency crews pulled 15 people, including a child, from the site, the State Emergency Service said, according to the Kyiv Post. “Today, as a ‘birthday gift’ to Putin, the Russian army destroyed a residential building in Pryluky,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media. “It was an ordinary five-story apartment block.”

RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service showed the building torn open, its roof destroyed and windows blown out. “The fire was right in front of my eyes. There were explosions. I was screaming in my apartment,” a resident identified as Lidiya told Current Time. “So many people have died. I knew everyone here.” Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi said a police officer was wounded in Pryluky, and that her husband, who until recently had fought at the front with a police unit, and her mother were killed, the Kyiv Post reported.

The capital was hit in waves. Explosions were heard in Kyiv around 3:15 a.m. and again two hours later, the Kyiv Independent reported. Two bodies were found as firefighters put out a blaze at a garage cooperative in the Darnytskyi district, and warehouses were hit in Podil. In Kremenchuk, Mayor Vitaliy Maletskyi described some of the most extensive damage to housing in the city since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. Strikes also hit an industrial site in Dnipro, transport infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia and critical infrastructure in Oleksandriia, officials said.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia used ballistic, cruise and anti-ship missiles along with drones. It reported shooting down or suppressing 39 of 48 cruise missiles and 117 of 130 attack drones, but only five of an unspecified number of ballistic missiles, with hits recorded at 18 locations, the Kyiv Independent said. Zelensky put the total at 70 missiles, many of them ballistic, plus Shahed drones aimed at 12 regions, and said the energy sector was a key target. “And air defense packages are a vital necessity for us right now. That is precisely why, every day, we are seeking Patriot missiles,” he wrote, according to the Kyiv Post.

In Kyiv, police posted pictures of what they said was an unexploded Russian Iskander missile in the middle of a Kyiv district. BBC Verify confirmed the images were genuine, and said the apparent missile fragments came down on open land surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings.

Ukraine said it had hit back. Zelensky said Ukrainian forces struck two Russian oil facilities and a military training ground in the Perm, Samara and Astrakhan regions in the past 24 hours, adding: “There was also a response in the Black Sea.” Russia’s Transport Ministry said naval drones attacked a Liberian-flagged tanker near Sochi, setting crude oil burning on the sea; its 23 crew members, all Indian citizens, were rescued. The BBC identified the vessel as the Aframax Rio, and the Ukrainian monitoring site BlackSeaNews said it was part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet used to evade sanctions, RFE/RL reported. Moscow had not commented on the strikes on Ukraine, the BBC said.

The barrage came as Ukraine heads into a fifth wartime winter, with Russian strikes now a daily occurrence and Moscow having previously targeted energy infrastructure to leave people without heat or power, RFE/RL noted. It also came amid renewed U.S. interest in negotiating a settlement, though Kyiv and Moscow remain far apart, with the Kremlin still demanding full control of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

Sources: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; Kyiv Post; Kyiv Independent; BBC News.