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As many as 14 people have been killed after Vladimir Putin unleashed at least two ballistic missiles on Kyiv, targeting a row of residential blocks of flats.
Footage from the aftermath of the bombing on Ukraine’s capital shows a building ripped in half, with nine floors crumbled to the ground in a pile of wreckage.
Russia’s missiles hit Kyiv in the middle of the night, while residents slept in their homes, in one of the deadliest attacks on the city in recent months.
Another 99 people were wounded but search and rescue services are still combing through the rubble of destroyed buildings.
A wave of 175 Shahed drones and a dozen cruise missiles also slammed into the city of around 3.6 million people.
An air raid alert remained active for more than seven hours, forcing them into shelters.
Olena Lapyshniak, 49, was shaken from the attack that nearly leveled her apartment building.
She heard a whistling sound followed by two explosions that blew out her windows and doors.
She aid: ‘It’s horrible, it’s scary, in one moment there is no life. There is no military infrastructure here, nothing here, nothing. It is horrible when people just die at night.’
Inna Sovsun, a member of the Ukrainian parliament for the liberal Holos party, said one of the Russian missiles hit ‘a dorm full of students’.
She said: ‘Not a military base. Not a command center. A place where young people sleep and study.’
The Kyiv City Military Administration said that ‘the nature of the damage is direct hits on residential buildings.’
‘Rockets – from the upper floors to the basement,’ it added in a statement.
Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack ‘one of the most terrifying strikes on Kyiv’ and said Russian forces fired more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine overnight.
The Ukrainian president wrote on X: ‘In Kyiv, efforts are underway to rescue people from under the rubble of an ordinary residential building – it is still unclear how many remain trapped.
‘The Russians destroyed an entire section of the apartment block. In total, buildings in eight districts of Kyiv have been damaged.
‘Response efforts are still ongoing after the strike on Odesa. Emergency workers are operating at all the sites of impact.’
He said Putin is ‘doing this simply because he can afford to continue the war, adding: ‘He wants the war to go on.
‘It is troubling when the powerful of this world turn a blind eye to it.’
Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Kirovohrad and Mykolaiv also suffered massive attacks overnight
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