Ukrainian officials put the death toll at 29, with 48 missing
Dozens of rescuers and volunteers searched the cratered blast site of the destroyed aid facility and shelter in Komyushuvakha on Tuesday. The site is in a village in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, and the workers hoped to find missing residents alive under the rubble. Rescue teams instead pulled out more bodies and carried them away in white plastic sheeting.
Ukrainian officials said the death toll from the Russian attack had reached 29 on Tuesday, with 48 people still missing. People had gathered at the site to receive humanitarian aid when it was attacked.
Mykhailo Semikin, acting head of the regional military administration, said Tuesday that the dead included four police officers and two rescue workers. At least five people were hurt in the attack.
“The scale of the tragedy is terrifying,” Semikin wrote in an online post. “This is one of the worst tragedies in terms of the number of civilian victims in our region since the start of the full-scale war.”
Three days of mourning were declared in Zaporizhzhia. Russian bunker-busting bombs filled with nearly 1.5 tons of explosives were used in Monday’s attack.
Across Ukraine, the overnight strikes targeted power plants, damaged hospitals and wounded scores of people. In an online post, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia launched 289 attack drones, 17 ballistic missiles and 59 cruise missiles across nine regions, triggering emergency power cuts. The post said the barrage coincided with U.S. elections.
“The Russians think America won’t notice this signal of theirs,” Zelenskyy said. “But we need to notice and stop such terror. We need to help Ukraine defend its skies; otherwise, Russia will never stop its missile strikes.”
Separately, a brief ceasefire in Ukraine’s Kherson region ended.
A Ukrainian drone attack wounded two employees at an oil refinery in Yaroslavl, regional Gov. Mikhail Yevrayev said Tuesday. He added that there was damage to the refinery’s infrastructure.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense said Tuesday that it had shot down 856 Ukrainian drones overnight. Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 493 drones were fired toward the Russian capital.
Rolling blackouts were instituted in the south, west and east of Russian-occupied Crimea following attacks on energy infrastructure, Moscow-installed officials said Tuesday.
In the northeast region of Kharkiv, a combined Russian missile and drone attack wounded at least 62 people, local authorities said. A strike damaged a medical facility in the Nemyshlianskyi district, shattered windows in four apartment buildings and damaged cars. Oleh Syniehubov, head of the regional military administration, said more than 200 patients were transferred to other medical facilities.
In the Dnipro area, rescuers pulled a woman alive from the rubble Tuesday morning after a Russian attack killed one person and wounded 17, local authorities said. The attack damaged an outpatient clinic and a hospital. Oleksandr Hanzha, head of the regional military administration, said patients were transferred to other hospitals.