Ukrainian regions hit in overnight Russian attacks, 37 injured, 2 missing — Zelenskyy
Abdullateef Fowewe
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has claimed “intense overnight” Russian missile and drone attacks across ten regions, with civilian casualties and damage to housing, hotels, gas stations and rail infrastructure, even as Ukrainian air defenses said they downed more than 200 aerial targets since the start of the day.
In Odesa, Zelenskyy in a statement on Saturday said rescue and search operations were continuing at the site of an apartment building damaged by a Russian missile, with 37 people injured and two still missing.
“Our cities and communities have been under almost constant attack since last night,” he wrote, adding that “all necessary emergency services are on the scene.”
A separate drone strike on a hotel in Chornomorsk, also in the Odesa region, injured 11 people, including six with limited mobility, according to his account.
Fatalities were recorded in other areas: two people were killed when a “Shahed” drone struck residential buildings in the Zaporizhzhia region, where six others were injured, and there were additional casualties after a strike on an enterprise in Zaporizhzhia.
In Kryvyi Rih, a missile hit critical infrastructure, killing one person and injuring three, while two more people were injured in the Kyiv region, Zelenskyy said.
He extended “condolences to all the families and loved ones of the victims.”
Despite the scale of the interceptions, Zelenskyy stressed that “not all of them” were shot down and that Russian drones were still flying over many regions.
He pointed to strikes on ordinary gas stations in the Zhytomyr and Rivne regions and on a locomotive depot in the Odesa region as evidence of attacks on civilian infrastructure.
Zelenskyy framed the raids as part of a broader pattern of escalation, saying, “When the Russians so blatantly turn ordinary people into targets of their terrorist attacks, it is frustrating that the response from the world’s strongest powers does not match the level of Russia’s escalation.”
He argued that “a matching response that truly has a chance of stopping the killings and protecting people is always a joint one,” and thanked partners providing anti-ballistic defense and other support to Ukraine.
