Russian drones, missiles pummel cities across Ukraine

KHARKIV: Russian bombardments of Ukrainian cities overnight killed at least one person and wounded more than three dozen more authorities said on Friday, as Moscow escalated its bombing campaign of civilian hubs.

Rescue workers were taking stock of the damage as officials in Kyiv announced that a Russian strike one day earlier in the industrial city of Zaporizhzhia had killed a toddler, his mother and grandmother.

AFP journalists in Kharkiv -- Ukraine’s second-largest city -- saw first responders hauling panicked civilians from Soviet-era residential buildings damaged in the strike that were littered with broken glass and rubble.

“Throughout the evening and night, terrorists attacked our cities and communities. Missiles, drones and glide bombs were used against the Odesa, Kharkiv and Kyiv regions,“ President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media.

“It is important to act together and decisively at the international level every time Russia tries to destroy our lives,“ he said, appealing to allies for more military aid.

The air force said Moscow had launched five missiles, 92 drones as well as the glide bombs across Ukraine overnight. Its units downed four missiles and 62 drones, the statement added.

Authorities in Zaporizhzhia, which was struck on Thursday afternoon, said the toll from that attack had risen again to 10, while an advisor to Zelensky’s chief of staff said among those killed were three members of one family.

“A woman with a one-and-a-half-year-old son and a grandmother died in Zaporizhzhia as a result of a Russian strike,“ advisor Daria Zarivna wrote on social media.

In Kharkiv, which Russia is increasingly targeting in night-time bombardments, 25 people were wounded in attacks on residential and commercial districts of the city.

Fears over US aid

Four people were wounded near Kyiv, which had been targeted almost daily over the last month and where AFP journalists heard air raid sirens and at least one explosion echo out over the capital.

In the historic Black Sea city of Odesa, one person was killed and nine others were wounded in an attack that damaged residential buildings, authorities said.

Later, authorities in the southern region of Kherson, which is also partly occupied, said a 74-year-old man had been killed by Russian shelling.

The latest night of deadly strikes comes at a critical moment of the war -- launched by the Kremlin nearly three years ago.

Ukrainian forces are losing ground in the east of the country and concerns are mounting in Kyiv over the future of foreign military aid after the victory of Donald Trump in the United States presidential election.

Zaporizhzhia city, where authorities said more than 40 people had been wounded in Thursday’s strike, has also come under increasing Russian aerial bombardments in recent weeks.

Six people were killed in a strike on an industrial sector of the city earlier this week.

In late 2022, the Kremlin claimed to have annexed the wider Zaporizhzhia region, alongside the Donetsk region where Russian forces are advancing rapidly, despite not having full military control over them.

Russian officials in occupied Ukrainian territory in Donetsk meanwhile said that Ukrainian drones had killed two employees of a utilities company.