A two-year-old girl was found dead under the rubble of a house outside the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro overnight after Russian missiles had struck a residential area, the region’s governor said.
Serhiy Lysak added that another 22 people were injured, including five children, three of whom were previously described as seriously hurt, in an attack that destroyed or damaged several buildings.
“Overnight, the body of a girl who had just turned two was pulled from under the rubble of a house,” the governor said, who said 17 children had been killed in the Dnipropetrovsk region alone since the start of the war.
A total of 485 children are known to have died across Ukraine and a further 1,005 have been injured since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, according to figures compiled by the country’s office of the prosecutor general on Sunday.
“Many of them could have become famous scholars, artists, sports champions, contributing to Ukraine’s history,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tweeted on Sunday, but instead “they fell victim to the enemy’s missiles and hate”.
His tweet was accompanied by a video detailing several child fatalities and injuries. The youngest known victim, Serhii, was two days old when he died after Russia shelled a maternity ward in Vilniansk, in Zaporizhzia region, in November last year.
Lysak released pictures of shattered buildings on his Telegram feed. A missile struck between two two-story residential buildings in the town of Pidhorodne, the governor said, which lies on the outskirts of Dnipro city.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia fired six Kh-101 or Kh-555 cruise missiles overnight, and a further five Iranian-designed Shahed drones. Four of the missiles and three of the drones were destroyed, it added.
Kyiv’s civil military administration said air defences destroyed all the missiles and drones that were aimed at the city “at distant approaches” – meaning that for the second night in a row the city was not bombed.
The capital has been the target of near-nightly bombing raids for more than a month as the Kremlin appears focused on trying to knock out or exhaust the city’s Patriot air defence systems before a widely anticipated Ukrainian counter attack.
Three people were killed, including a nine-year-old girl, early on Thursday morning, on the country’s International Children’s Day, when debris from an intercepted Iskander missile landed into a crowd of people trying to reach a bomb shelter that had not been opened.
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