Russia hits apartment block, kills four in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia – officials

By Sergiy Chaly

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (Reuters) -A Russian missile slammed into a five-storey apartment building in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine on Thursday, killing at least four people, Ukrainian officials said.

Rescue workers carried away the wounded on stretchers and clambered through the ruined building looking for survivors after the early-morning strike, a Reuters television crew on the scene said.

The upper floors of the apartment block had been destroyed and cars parked nearby had been crumpled. Fallen debris lay around the building.

“The people were screaming from under the rubble. It was hard to hear. We were shocked,” Yuliia Kharytenko, a 36-year-old woman who lives in the apartment block, told Reuters.

“We ran out in whatever we were wearing. Our cat is left there, scared. We don’t know if it is alive.”

The Ukrainian state prosecutor’s office said four people had been killed and eight wounded in the attack. Another five were unaccounted for, it said.

Seven of those rescued were being treated in hospital, and three of then were in a serious condition, said Anatoliy Kurtev, a senior city council official.

Among those who survived was a 30-year-old man who rescue workers said had been sleeping on a couch at the time of the attack and was trapped under a concrete slab.

“For almost three hours rescuers worked to recover him from under the slab. He is alive and well, everything is fine,” said volunteer rescue worker Ivan Zdorovets.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned the attack in a Facebook post, saying Ukraine would drive out the Russian forces who invaded Ukraine in February last year.

“The terrorist state wants to turn every day for our people into a day of terror. But evil will not reign in our land. We will drive all the occupiers out and they will definitely be held accountable for everything,” he wrote.

Moscow did not immediately comment on the events in Zaporizhzhia. It denies deliberately targeting civilians, but has devastated towns and cities across Ukraine in missile and drone strikes.

(Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic and Kyiv newsroom, Editing by Timothy Heritage)