KYIV (Reuters) -A Russian-guided bomb struck a multi-storey apartment building on Sunday in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, triggering a fire and killing one person and injuring 42, officials said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the latest attack underscored the need for Ukraine’s Western partners to provide weapons and air defence systems and permission to use weaponry on targets deep inside Russia to save lives.
Prosecutors in Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine said on Telegram that the body of a 94-year-old woman had been recovered from the ninth floor of the building.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the fire sparked by the bomb had been extinguished. He put the injury toll at 42, including three children. Regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov had earlier said residents could be under the rubble.
Syniehubov posted photos of heavy damage to the top four of five storeys of the building, with smoke and fire billowing out of blown-out windows.
Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address, said three other guided bombs had struck villages in Kharkiv region, where population centres have been a frequent target of Russian attacks near the Russian border.
Russia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the apartment building incident but has denied intentionally targeting civilians despite having killed thousands of them since it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Zelenskiy called for rapid decisions on long-range strikes “in order to destroy Russian military aviation right where it is based. These are obvious, logical decisions.
“Every Russian strike of this nature, every instance of Russian terror, like today in Kharkiv…this proves that there must be long-range capability and it must be sufficient.”
He said appropriate decisions were expected in the first instance from the United States, France, Germany and Italy, “those whose decisiveness can help save lives.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that the West would be directly fighting with Russia if it allowed Ukraine to strike Russian territory with Western-made long-range missiles.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Peter Graff, Ron Popeski, Lisa Shumaker and Andrea Ricci)
