At least 19 people have been killed after two Russian missiles hit a multi-storey apartment building and a leisure center in the port city of Odessa on Friday morning, Ukrainian officials were quoted as saying by The Guardian. Four of the victims were children.
Ukraine’s armed forces have issued an alert urging residents to take shelter after three explosions and air raid alarms were heard just before local time 1.
Odessa army spokesman Sergei Bratchuk sent a message on the Telegram that an “enemy missile” had hit the port city. “Unfortunately, there are casualties,” he added. Later, Bratchuk specified that the rocket attack was launched from the direction of the Black Sea.
“One rocket hit a nine-story residential building, the other a recreation center in the Belgorod-Dniester region,” he said.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said that at 6 a.m. Friday that at least 14 people were killed and 30 injured – including three children – in the attack on the block. Three people – including a child – were killed in a separate attack on the leisure center, and one was injured, SES said.
Rescuers continue to search among the ruins, announces the State Emergency Service.
The attack comes after Ukrainian forces recaptured Snake Island, a strategic Black Sea island off the south coast near the city of Odessa. Russia described the retreat from Snake Island as a “gesture of goodwill.”
In retort, the Kremlin came up with a hallucinatory new statement denying that it had hit a block of flats and a building in a spa in Odes on Thursday night.
Despite photos and videos of the buildings collapsed and the intervention of rescue forces among the ruins, Moscow claims that such a thing cannot have happened. “I would like to remind you of the words of the president (Vladimir Putin) that the Russian armed forces do not work with civilian targets,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.