Happy birthday, Vladimir — here’s the body count. Russia hammered Kyiv and cities across Ukraine overnight into Wednesday with what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called about 70 missiles, many of them ballistic, plus attack drones, in one of the biggest strikes since the full-scale war began in 2022, Al Jazeera and Reuters report. At least 20 people, including children, were killed.
The deadliest hit landed in Pryluky, in the northern Chernihiv region, where a cruise missile scored a direct hit on a five-story apartment building while residents slept. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said 14 people were killed there, including four children, and 50 were injured, seven of them children; rescuers pulled 15 people from the rubble, Euromaidan Press reports.
“Today, for Putin’s birthday, the Russian army ‘gave’ him the destruction of an apartment building in Pryluky in Chernihiv Oblast. It was an ordinary five-story building,” Zelenskyy said. Putin turns 74 today, per the Guardian.
The rest of the map: two dead in a fire at a garage cooperative in Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district, where bomb techs also worked around an unexploded ballistic missile that fell among apartment blocks; two dead in Kremenchuk; two in Oleksandriia; damage in Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 130 drones and 48 cruise missiles plus ballistic missiles, and that air defenses downed 161 targets. Poland scrambled jets and put ground-based air defenses on alert.
Russia’s Defense Ministry called it a “massive strike” on military-industrial sites, including where Fire Point builds Flamingo cruise missiles and long-range drones. Zelenskyy says ballistic missiles remain the biggest problem and Kyiv is hunting daily for Patriot interceptors. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha’s take: “On Putin’s birthday, Russian generals brought him his favorite present: war crimes.”
Brussels answered with cash: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced €1.24 billion for Ukrainian drones and missiles, saying “Russia is pursuing a deliberate strategy of terror.” Translation: winter came early, and it’s armed.
Sources: Al Jazeera (Reuters) · Euromaidan Press · The Guardian · Kyiv Post
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