Two children among 10 killed in Russian missile strike on Sumy, Ukraine says

KYIV (Reuters) – Ten people, including two children, were killed and 52 were injured on Sunday night when a Russian missile hit a residential nine-storey building in Ukraine’s northeastern region of Sumy, Ukraine’s emergency services and military said.

“Sunday evening for the city of Sumy became hell, a tragedy that Russia brought to our land,” Volodymyr Artyukh, the head of the Sumy military administration said in a post on the administration’s Telegram messaging channel.

The State Emergency Service of Ukraine said on Telegram that rescuers and all necessary services continued to work at the scene and psychologists were providing assistance to those affected.

More than 400 people were evacuated, the Service added.

Pictures posted on the Service’s Telegram showed firefighters battling a blaze consuming cars and rescuers carrying people out of a building. A photo showed a multi-storey building with nearly all windows blown out and facade damaged.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the Ukrainian reports. There was no immediate comment from Moscow.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in their strikes on each other’s territory. But thousands have died since early 2022 in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the vast majority of them Ukrainians.

The attack on Sumy followed a morning of Russia pounding Ukraine’s power grid in what Kyiv said was a “massive” attack with 120 missiles and 90 drones that killed at least seven people.

(Reporting by Olena Harmash, Tom Balmforth and Lidia Kelly; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Andrea Ricci)