Five dead and key government building struck in largest Russian airstrike on Ukraine to date

At least five people have been killed and dozens more injured in overnight Russian airstrikes on multiple Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, where a key government building has caught fire, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said on Sunday morning.

Blaming falling debris from intercepted attack drones, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuliya Sviridenko said that the upper floors and roof of the seat of the Ukrainian government, the Cabinet of Ministers, had caught fire in the early hours of Sunday morning, and that the emergency services were working to extinguish the blaze.

“We will restore the buildings. But lost lives cannot be returned. The enemy is terrorising and killing our people across the country every day,” Sviridenko wrote on her Telegram channel. “This is how the headquarters of Ukraine’s government now looks after this morning’s Russian attack,” she said on Sunday afternoon as she posted a video of herself inspecting the damage.

“Our whole team works in this building daily. Fortunately, no one was injured. Russian barbarism will not halt the work of Ukraine’s government,” Sviridenko continued.

Elsewhere in the Ukrainian capital a nine-storey apartment building and a four-storey house were also hit, according to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine.

Speaking from outside the partially destroyed nine-storey building, Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said in a video posted on his Telegram channel that two people — a young mother and her two-month old son — had been confirmed dead at the scene. A third person, who rescuers found in the rubble, was proclaimed dead on Monday morning.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that in total over 800 drones and 13 missiles were used by the Russian military in the attack, making it the largest single strike on the country since the war began over three and a half years ago.

According to Zelensky, two more people were killed in Russian strikes in the village of Safonivka in northern Ukraine’s Sumy region, and in the next door Chernihiv region, though he provided no further details.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, three people were injured in drone strikes on the southwestern port city of Odesa, while another four people were injured in the central Ukrainian cities of Dnipro and Kryvyi Rih, the State Emergency Service said, adding that multiple drones appeared to have entered Ukrainian airspace from neighbouring Belarus.

Calling the attacks “a deliberate crime and a prolongation of the war”, Zelensky stressed that all that was needed to “force the Kremlin criminals to stop the killings” was “political will”.