A woman and her three children were killed in their apartment by a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rig, the hometown of President Volodymyr Zelensky in east-central Ukraine, according to the final toll announced Tuesday by Ukrainian authorities.
• Also read: General air alert in Ukraine, where Russian strikes kill six people
• Also read: Russia: the army announces having shot down 70 Ukrainian drones, half of which in the Moscow region
• Also read: Ukraine: death toll from strikes on Zaporizhzhia rises to eight
A Russian missile destroyed a section of a residential building Monday morning. The regional governor announced in the evening the discovery of the woman’s body buried under the rubble, also reporting fourteen injured.
Later, rescuers found the bodies of his three children, the public prosecutor’s office said Tuesday morning announcing the end of the rescue operation.
They are two boys aged two and ten and a two-month-old girl, their grandmother told local media. According to her, the father survived because he had gone into another room at the time of the explosion.
In total, “around forty residential buildings” in this industrial city were damaged in the Russian attack on Monday morning, said Interior Minister Igor Klymenko.
This tragedy caused a wave of emotion in Ukraine, recalling a similar tragedy in Lviv, a large western city where a mother and her three teenage daughters were killed in their home by a Russian missile in early September. Only the father survived.
“Yesterday’s attack in Kryvyï Rig took away a mother and her three children (…) Only the father survived. It is an indescribable sorrow! Condolences to loved ones,” Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Loubinets said on Telegram on Tuesday.
Russia has been shelling civilian areas across Ukraine since the start of its invasion of its neighbor launched in February 2022.
This armed conflict, the worst in Europe since the Second World War, has left tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead in Ukraine.
