A Russian Kh-101 missile hit a Pryluky apartment block directly, killing 22 people, five of them children

Note

Russia’s overnight missile and drone attack on Wednesday, Oct 7, hit Kyiv and 12 regions, President Volodymyr Zelensky said: about 70 missiles, many of them ballistic, plus Shahed drones. In Pryluky, a city in the Chernihiv region, a Kh-101 cruise missile scored a direct hit on a residential building, he said. In his first post that morning, Zelensky called it an ordinary five-story apartment block and said people might still be under the rubble. Images from the scene showed a large section of the building collapsed, the Kyiv Post reported.

The count climbed through the day. Zelensky’s first post listed five dead. By afternoon he reported 18, among them four children he named: Oleksandr, Kyrylo and Serhii, each one year old, and eight-year-old Maksym. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported a fifth child killed that evening, according to the Kyiv Independent, and Zelensky’s evening post put the Pryluky toll at 19, including five children.

On Thursday morning Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said 22 deaths had been confirmed, five of them children, with 54 people injured, seven of them children. Zelensky then said the search and rescue operation in Pryluky had ended with 22 dead. More than 500 emergency workers were deployed at the site, and 15 people were rescued alive, including a child.

The attack fell on Vladimir Putin’s 74th birthday, and Zelensky framed it that way. On Wednesday evening he put the toll from the whole attack at 25 dead and 100 injured, a count made when Pryluky stood at 19. Two people were killed in Kyiv and two in Oleksandriia, he said earlier in the day. On Thursday he added that a Russian aerial bomb had hit a public transport stop in Kramatorsk that morning, with 12 people killed so far. Russia has not commented in the sources reviewed.