Russian strike on Ukraine kills mother, three children
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A man in Ukraine is comforted after rescuers removed the bodies of a 32-year-old woman and her three children, including a two-month-old baby, from the rubble of a residential building after a Russian attack.
PHOTO: X/@LOEX_SCHERBA, AFP
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KYIV - Ukraine said on Nov 12 that the toll from a Russian strike on the hometown of President Volodymyr Zelensky had killed four people: a 32-year-old woman and her three children, including a newborn.
The strike on Kryvyi Rih a day earlier ripped into the upper storeys of a Soviet-era residential building in the industrial town, burying victims beneath debris.
Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said on the morning of Nov 12 that rescue operations at the scene were completed and announced the death toll, adding that 14 people had been wounded in the strike.
“The youngest victim of the Russian strike was just two months old. The missile attack killed four people: a mother with three children,” he said in a statement on social media.
The office of the prosecutor-general said the bodies of a 32-year-old woman, a two-month-old baby and children aged two and 10 had been retrieved from the rubble.
In a separate post, they said a total of 589 children had been killed and 1,681 wounded since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets wrote on social media that the children’s father was the sole survivor in the family of the attack, describing his response as “indescribable grief”.
Ukrainian media reported that he was in a different room at the time of the strike.
Emergency services distributed images showing municipal workers in helmets carrying one of the dead in a white body bag over mounds of brick and bent metal.
“Every night, children in Ukraine go to sleep with fear and uncertainty as the threat of attacks looms over them,” Unicef representative to Ukraine Munir Mammadzade said, in a statement after the attack.
“Every child killed or injured leaves a deep life-long scar among families, friends and communities,” the statement said, urging attacks on children to be stopped.
Separately, authorities in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia said two people were wounded by Russian strikes in the large civilian hub that has come under increasing fatal bombardments.
Russia claimed to have annexed the wider Zaporizhzhia region in late 2022 alongside three other regions despite not having full military control over them. AFP
