At least one person has died and 23 left injured, including a child, after Russia fired four Kalibr cruise missiles at a Ukrainian civilian city, local officials have reported. The attack, which happened overnight, caused a huge fire in the top floor of an apartment block, while it also damaged two houses and a historical building. According to local reports, the child injured in the incident will be in hospital for several days as a result of the vicious missile attack.
Ukrainian emergency services rushed to the scene to extinguish the fire, which had engulfed the top of the apartment block following the attack.
Firefighters then worked through the night to clear the rubble and rescue the nearly two dozen civilians hit by the missiles.
Many of the injured, including a child, were rushed to a nearby hospital, but one civilian was pronounced dead at the scene.
The Southern Operational Command of Ukraine‘s Armed Forces said Russia had fired four Kalibr cruise missiles, each with an estimated cost of over £5.2 million.
In an update on Facebook, they said the missiles were launched from the Black Sea and directed “using terrain features and trajectory changes to complicate detection” by Ukraine‘s air defences.
The military called the Russian attack “an obvious fact of terror of the civilian population” since this missile type is “a high-precision weapon that works according to targeting coordinates”.
It is not clear whether there are any military positions within Mykolaiv that Russia could have been targeting.
The southern Ukrainian city, a shipbuilding centre and a port on the Southern Buh River, has been a frequent target of Russian attacks.
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On Wednesday, Russia shelled 147 settlements using mortars, small arms, tanks, artillery, multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), anti-aircraft missile systems, drones, cruise missiles, and tactical aviation, according to Ukraine‘s Defense Ministry.
The attacks killed seven civilians, including the one fatally hit in Mykolaiv overnight.
Three more died in Donetsk Oblast, the hottest region of fighting at the moment, while one died in Kherson Oblast and two more in Zaporizhzhia.
At least 32 more civilians were injured in the Russia attacks.