Russian missile strike kills one, injures 15 in Ukraine’s Kryvyi Rih

(Reuters) — A ballistic missile struck an apartment building in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Tuesday, killing one person and injuring 15, four of them seriously, officials said.

Ukrainian officials denounced the Christmas Eve attack on the city, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown.

“The monsters landed a direct hit on a four-storey residential block with 32 apartments,” the head of the city’s military administration, Oleksandr Vilkul, wrote on Telegram.

One man whose body had been pulled from under the rubble could not be revived by medics, regional governor Serhiy Lysak said.

Vilkul later said that a woman had been rescued and taken to a hospital after spending four hours covered in rubble.

“While other countries of the world are celebrating Christmas, Ukrainians are continuing to suffer from endless Russian attacks,” Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets wrote on Telegram.

Governor Lysak posted photographs of rescuers trawling through a large pile of rubble, recovering a person covered in dust and loading them into an ambulance.

Kryvyi Rih is a steelmaking city with a pre-war population of more than 600,000.

Its southern outskirts lie about 40 miles from the nearest Russian-occupied territory, and it has regularly been the target of Russian missile attacks throughout the war.

Russia says it does not deliberately target civilians, although thousands have been killed since Moscow launched its invasion in 2022.