Russian attacks on Ukrainian city of Kharkiv kill 4, wound over 2 dozen

Kyiv: Russian attacks targetting the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv killed at least four people and wounded more than two dozen others on Saturday, officials said, as hopes for peace dimmed further.

The first wave on Ukraine’s second-largest city was a large Russian drone-and-missile attack in the early hours. It killed at least three people and wounded 21 others, according to local officials.

In the afternoon, Russia dropped aerial bombs on the city centre, killing at least one person and wounding five more, Kharkiv’s mayor said.

The warring sides also accused each other of trying to sabotage a planned prisoner exchange, nearly a week after Kyiv embarrassed the Kremlin with a surprising drone attack on military airfields deep inside Russia.

Saturday’s barrage — the latest in near daily widescale attacks on Ukraine — included aerial glide bombs that have become part of a fierce Russian onslaught in the all-out war, which began on February 24, 2022.

As firefighters and emergency workers bustled around attack sites in Kharkiv, residents described the strikes that damaged their homes and nearly took their lives on Saturday morning.

Alina Belous said that she had tried to extinguish flames with buckets of water to rescue a young girl -- trapped inside a burning building -- who had called out for help.

“We were trying to put it out ourselves with our buckets, together with our neighbours. Then the rescuers arrived and started helping us put out the fire, but there was smoke and they worried that we couldn’t stay there. When the ceiling started falling off, they took us out,” she said.

Local resident Vadym Ihnachenko said that he thought at first that it was a neighbouring building going up in flames.

“But when we saw sparks coming from the top, we realised it was our building,” he said.

Ukraine’s air force said that Russia struck with 215 missiles and drones overnight, and Ukrainian air defences shot down 87 drones and seven missiles.

Several other areas in Ukraine were also hit, including the regions of Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and the city of Ternopil, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in an X post.

The Russian Defence Ministry on Saturday said that its forces carried out a night time strike on Ukrainian military targets, including ammunition depots, drone assembly workshops, and weaponry repair stations.

There was no comment from Moscow on the reports of casualties in Kharkiv.

Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said that the strikes also damaged 18 apartment buildings and 13 private homes. Terekhov said that it was “the most powerful attack” on the city since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Children among the wounded

Kharkiv’s regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said the morning’s attacks saw two districts in the city struck with three missiles, five aerial glide bombs and 48 drones. Among the wounded were two children, a baby boy and a 14-year-old girl, he added.

Six people are believed to be trapped under the rubble of an industrial facility in Kharkiv’s Kyiv district, the Kharkiv prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Telegram. Contact with those trapped was lost and rescue attempts have been ongoing since early afternoon, it said, without naming the facility.

On Saturday afternoon, Russian aerial bombs struck Kharkiv again, killing at least one person and wounding five others, the mayor said.

The morning strikes also wounded two people in the Dnipropetrovsk province further south, according to local Gov Serhii Lysak.

Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said that its forces shot down 36 Ukrainian drones overnight, over the country’s south and west, including near the capital. Drone debris wounded two civilians in the suburbs of Moscow, local Gov Andrei Vorobyov reported.