Russian shelling kills at least nine, wounds 21 in Ukraine

SLOVIANSK, Ukraine – Russian missiles hit residential buildings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk on Friday, killing at least nine people, wounding 21 others and reducing parts of apartment blocks to a tangled mess of metal and concrete.

Emergency services in the eastern Donetsk region, in a statement on Facebook, said the death toll stood at nine at midnight (5am on Saturday, Singapore time), including a two-year-old child.

Mr Pavlo Kyrylenko, Governor of the Donetsk region, said on national television earlier that seven Russian S-300 missiles had been fired.

He said there were “no fewer than seven spots hit” in Sloviansk, west of Bakhmut city,

site of the heaviest fighting on the Ukrainian front line.

Rescue teams searching for victims sifted through rubble through the night, using cranes, ladders and heavy equipment in the shells of apartments and stairwells. Workers perched precariously on slabs of concrete and moved gingerly up and down ladders.

For some of the shattered apartments, little more than window frames and dangling scraps of plaster remained.

One section of apartments was all but obliterated. A set of crimson curtains remained in place on one balcony.

Much of the work, carried out under night illumination, involved reaching the top of sprawling apartment buildings – the top two floors of one five-storey building had collapsed.

Emergency services said more than 50 rescue workers remained at the site.

Mr Kyrylenko said teams pulled from the rubble one woman born in 1946. A senior official in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, Ms Daria Zarivna, earlier said a child pulled alive from the site of the attack had died on the way to hospital.

Emergency services said several dozen multi-storey buildings and individual houses were damaged in the assault.

“The evil state once again demonstrates its essence,” Mr Zelensky wrote in a separate post accompanied by footage of a damaged building.

“Just killing people in broad daylight; ruining, destroying all life.”

AFP journalists on the scene saw rescue workers digging for survivors on the top floor of a Soviet-era residential building and black smoke billowing from homes on fire across the street.

The street beneath – including a playground – was covered in a layer of concrete dust and debris, including torn pages from schoolbooks and children’s drawings.

“I live on the opposite side of the street and I was sleeping a little when I heard this huge boom and I ran out from my flat,” 59-year-old resident Larisa told AFP.

“I was really scared and in a state of shock,” she said, adding that the impact of the shelling had broken her windows and sent shards of glass flying throughout her home.

At another impact site in a residential neighbourhood, an elderly woman in a purple cardigan – dazed from the blasts – was gathering blown-off shards of metal from the ground outside a shop.

A resident nearby, who declined to give her name, told AFP journalists that the strikes had blown out her windows and dislodged her front door from its frame.

“Usually, when this happens, we immediately take cover in the bathroom,” she said.

“No one from our side of the building was injured but maybe someone here was,” she added, pointing to a pool of blood next to another entrance of her building.

In his nightly video address, issued later, Mr Zelensky said that not a single hour had passed in the run-up to this weekend’s Orthodox Easter services “without Russian murders and terror”.

“This is the evil state and it will be the loser. Victory is our duty given humanity of this sort,” he said.

Sloviansk and the nearby city of Kramatorsk are both coveted by Russian forces, currently bogged down in nearby Bakhmut, about 45km away, as they push ahead with their invasion of Ukraine. REUTERS, AFP