Four dead as Russian drone barrage hits Kharkiv homes

AFP

Russia launched a barrage of drones in an overnight attack on Ukraine on Friday, killing at least four people and injuring 35 in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, regional officials said.

In the fourth such strike on the city so far this week, Russian drones hit residential quarters, damaging several multi-storey apartment blocks and causing multiple fires.

Rescue teams sifted through rubble throughout the night, searching for survivors.

"As of this morning, unfortunately, there are already four dead. The body of one more person killed by the Russian aggressor has been (removed) from the rubble," Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on the Telegram app. "We also have 35 wounded."

The Prosecutor General's office said prosecutors were working to identify those who were killed. It also said in a statement that three children were among those injured in the drone attacks.

Ukrainian air defence units and mobile drone-hunting groups shot down 42 of 78 Russian drones overnight across Ukraine, the air force said. The military also used electronic warfare to redirect or spoof another 22 drones, it said.

Kharkiv has been subject to nearly nightly Russian drone strikes in the past week. In previous attacks, the city's industrial companies and infrastructure were damaged, officials said.

The city withstood the advance of Russian troops through Ukraine including on the capital Kyiv to the west in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion.

As Russian forces were driven back from the capital and subsequently focused on Ukraine's east, Kharkiv became a frequent target of air attacks.

The central Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv regions and also the Zaporizhzhia region in the southeast suffered damagefrom drone attacks, the Ukrainian military and regional officials said.

In the city of Dnipro, three people were injured and an infrastructure facility and several administrative and residential buildings were damaged in the nearby region, the governor said.

The governor said that 13 drones were shot down over the Dnipropetrovsk region overnight.

Two more people were injured in the central Kyiv capital region, regional officials said.

And in southeastern Zaporizhzhia, at least seven drones had attacked targets in the region, injuring one, the regional governor said.

More from International news

  • Russia, Ukraine swap 307 soldiers on second day of POW exchange

    Russia and Ukraine each exchanged 307 of their service personnel on Saturday on the second day of a prisoner exchange that, when completed, is set to be the largest such swap in the three-year war between the two countries. U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested the prisoner swap - which should see 1,000 prisoners released on each side over three days - could herald a new phase in stop-start efforts to negotiate a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv. Saturday's swap was announced by Russia's defence ministry, and separately by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a post on social

  • Police probe arson attack in France power outage

    French police were investigating a possible arson attack as being the main cause for a power outage which hit the Alpes-Maritimes region in southern France on Saturday, including Cannes which is hosting its world-famous annual film festival.

  • Ukraine says 15 people hurt in 'massive' Russian attack on capital

    Russia launched dozens of attack drones and ballistic missiles at Kyiv overnight in one of the biggest combined aerial attacks on the Ukrainian capital of the three-year war, damaging several apartment buildings and injuring at least 15 people.

  • South Africa rescues all 260 miners stuck underground alive

    Rescuers on Friday pulled out all 260 mine workers who had been stuck for more than 24 hours in an underground shaft in South Africa, the mine's operator said.

News