Seven killed in Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s Odesa apartment block

Separate attacks killed an additional three people in Ukraine as Zelenskyy urges the West to deliver more air defences.

A Russian drone attack on an apartment block in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa has killed at least seven people, including a three-year-old and a woman with an infant child, regional authorities said.

“Rescuers in Odesa have just uncovered the bodies of a mother with a three-month-old baby,” Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said in a post on the Telegram app on Saturday.

At the scene, smoke poured from rubble strewn across the ground where the drone had ripped a chunk several storeys high out of the building. Clothes and furniture were scattered in the ruined mass of concrete and steel hanging off the side of the apartment block.

Ukraine’s State Emergencies Service posted photos, including of a dead toddler being placed in a body bag by rescuers.

“This is impossible to forget! This is impossible to forgive,” it wrote. It said five people including a child had been rescued alive.

Odesa region governor Oleh Kiper said eight people were wounded, and rescuers were still looking for more people under the debris.