Russia launches massive drone attack on Kharkiv, 46 injured in apartment building, 29 injured in Zaporizhia

Russia launched a massive drone attack on Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv late on Friday. An apartment building was hit, injuring 46 people and causing fires, Reuters reported, citing Ukrainian officials.

Mayor Igor Terekhov wrote on the Telegram app that 12 locations in four districts in the city center had been hit. A house was also reportedly hit, and eight people were hospitalized. An 11-year-old child was among the injured.

President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the drone attacks, which target Ukrainian cities several times a week. He said that Ukraine was being attacked by dozens of drones, and that the country's allies were too slow to provide assistance for its air defense.

"They were not military targets, there are none there. "Russia is attacking residential buildings when Ukrainians are at home and putting their children to bed," Zelensky wrote on Telegram, quoted by Reuters.

Regional governor Oleg Sinegubov said rescue services were working through the night to deal with the aftermath of the attacks, despite the risk of new attacks.

Images circulating online showed firefighters battling flames, charred facades with broken windows and burning cars on streets strewn with debris.

Local authorities in the Kherson region said meanwhile that one person had died while trying to remove a fallen drone from his house when it exploded.

Four people were wounded in a drone and artillery attack on villages east of Nikopol in the Dnipropetrovsk region, local authorities said, cited by Reuters.

At least 29 people were injured in an attack earlier on Friday in Zaporizhia, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said.

Russia denies carrying out deliberate attacks on civilians, even though thousands of people have died since the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Reuters notes.

According to Ukrainian authorities, quoted by DPA, Russia launched about 150 drones, most of which were intercepted by Ukrainian defense.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported that in just an hour, Russian air defenses destroyed 10 drones – eight in the border region of Bryansk and two over Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

Russian media and local residents reported fires and explosions near air bases, especially around the port city of Sevastopol, where air raid sirens were sounded overnight, DPA added. According to the Moscow-appointed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, it was the largest Ukrainian attack this year. He said no one was injured.

The acting governor of the Rostov region bordering Ukraine, Yuri Slyusar, said air defenses had destroyed Ukrainian drones over five neighborhoods. The falling fragments damaged several houses, but there were no injuries.

The Moscow Civil Defense said earlier that a group of Russian firefighters had been injured in an attack by a Ukrainian drone in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region, DPA reported. According to the information, the eight men were extinguishing a fire near the town of Horlivka when they were attacked by combat drones.