Two people were killed and three others wounded when a Russian missile hit an apartment building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia early Wednesday, the local authorities said. The strike was part of a larger attack in which six Russian missiles damaged transportation infrastructure and homes in Zaporizhzhia overnight, according to Yuri Malashko, the head of the regional military administration.
“People were sleeping peacefully,” Mr. Malashko said in a statement accompanied by photographs showing a gutted building with part of its facade collapsed.
Rescue operations were underway on Wednesday morning to try to save anyone trapped under the rubble. Mr. Malashko said that three people were still missing.
Since the start of its full-scale invasion early last year, Russia has repeatedly struck infrastructure in Ukraine, claiming thousands of civilian lives in a campaign intended partly to destroy military and energy facilities but also to demoralize the local population. Early this month, a missile strike on a village cafe in northeastern Ukraine killed nearly 60 people, one of the biggest losses of civilian life since the war began.
Reacting to the strike in Zaporizhzhia, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russian forces had hit “an ordinary five-story residential building,” destroying eight apartments.
“Russian terror must be defeated,” he said in an online post that included a photograph of a building with piles of debris at its base and a gaping hole in the upper stories.
Zaporizhzhia, a city with a prewar population of 700,000, stands a few dozen miles from the war’s southern front line. Many people in the area have lost their homes to Russian bombardments, and residents who have stayed live with the threat that fighting around the nearby Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant could lead to a nuclear tragedy. The plant lost its source of cooling water when a major dam was destroyed in the summer.
A few hours after the missile hit the residential building, air raid alarms sounded at least three times in Zaporizhia, warning of another potential assault.
Ukraine’s military said that Russian troops had targeted nine regions over the past day. Other attacks on villages and industrial sites across the country killed at least three civilians, the local authorities said.
For its part, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that Kyiv’s forces had targeted two Russian regions bordering Ukraine with a wave of drones overnight. The ministry said that it had shot down 28 drones, a claim that could not be independently verified. It also remained unclear whether any drones had broken through Russian air defenses to hit targets inside Russia.
