21 wounded after Russia strikes apartment buildings in Ukrainian city of Kharkiv

KYIV: Russia launched new strikes in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv that hit high-rise apartment buildings, leaving at least 21 wounded in a second consecutive nighttime attack, authorities said.

The bombs fell Saturday night on the district of Shevchenkivsky, north of the centre of Kharkiv, which is the second-largest Ukrainian city, local Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said. Residential buildings sustained varying degrees of damage, including 16- and nine-story buildings, he added. Kharkiv's city council said that 18 buildings were damaged.

The wounded included an 8-year-old child, according to Syniehubov and Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov. Terekhov said that 60 residents were evacuated from one of the buildings, a high-rise that was hit directly.

Kharkiv has been a frequent target of Russian attacks since Moscow launched its all-out invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in February 2022.

The attack came after another late Friday that wounded 15 people, including children ages 10 and 12, when Russian airstrikes hit three Kharkiv neighborhoods, Terekhov said.

Ukrainian officials said that KAB-type aerial glide bombs — a retrofitted Soviet weapon that has for months laid waste to eastern Ukraine — were used in both attacks.

Russia also launched 80 Shahed drones and two missiles at Ukraine overnight into Sunday, the Ukrainian air force said. Ukrainian air defense shot down 71 drones, and another six were lost on location due to electronic warfare countermeasures, the statement said.

Farther south, a 12-year-old girl and a woman died after a Russian drone struck a passenger car in the city of Nikopol, local Gov. Serhii Lysak reported. Two others, including a 4-year-old child, suffered wounds.

A Russian airstrike on Saturday morning also struck private homes in the eastern city of Sloviansk, trapping a woman under rubble and also injuring two of her neighbors, regional prosecutors reported. Sloviansk, in Ukraine's Donetsk region, has been a key target for Russian forces as they continue their grinding push westwards aimed at capturing the entirety of the country's industrial east.

In southern Ukraine, a Russian drone strike on Sunday morning wounded two civilians in the city of Kherson, regional authorities said. Hours later, local police reported that Russian attacks wounded at least four more people elsewhere in the Kherson province.

Other Russian drone attacks Sunday damaged energy infrastructure in Ukraine's central Poltava region and the northern city of Shostka, local officials reported.

Shostka lies in the Sumy region, across the border from Russia's Kursk province — the target of a startling Ukrainian military incursion launched last month. Weeks into the incursion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelneskyy said that the aim is to create a buffer zone to prevent further Russian cross-border strikes that have for months wreaked havoc in Sumy.

Around 10,000 residents have left the nearby town of Hlukhiv because of intensified Russian shelling, around a third of its prewar population, the local military administration said Sunday in a Facebook update.

According to the post, almost 70 per cent of the town's children have left, following the regional government's calls to evacuate parts of the Sumy region nearest the Russian border. Hlukhiv lies less than 15 kilometres (9 miles) from Russian territory, and about 40 kilometres (25 miles) southeast of Shostka.

Also on Sunday, Ukrainian shelling wounded 10 people in Russia's southern Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, according to its Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov. Among them were a village head and members of a local self-defence force, Gladkov said.