A Russian glide bomb struck an apartment building in Kharkiv before dawn on Monday, injuring 22 people including children, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram. The blast in Ukraine’s northeastern hub came as authorities reported fresh attacks on Kyiv and followed a weekend of strikes across the country that killed at least eight people.
Terekhov did not immediately provide a street address or building count, but he said emergency crews were treating victims at the scene and that several floors of the structure were damaged. Regional officials said rescue workers were still searching the rubble as daylight broke over the city, which sits roughly 30 kilometers from the Russian border and has absorbed repeated bombardment since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Weekend toll across Ukraine
The Kharkiv injuries extend a violent stretch that began Sunday. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi said three people, including a 16-year-old girl, were killed when air strikes hit a children’s center in Sumy in northern Ukraine. In the Odesa region, authorities reported a “massive strike” that killed one person and damaged homes, a hotel, a medical building, and a grain warehouse.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that three people were killed in the southern Zaporizhia region and that a Russian drone strike killed one man in Kyiv. On Monday, Kyiv officials said a drone hit a petrol station in the capital without immediately releasing further casualty details.
Scale of recent attacks
In a post on X, Zelenskyy said Russia had launched more than 2,200 attack drones, 1,630 aerial bombs, and 38 missiles of various types against Ukraine in the past week. Ukrainian forces have responded with their own long-range campaign against Russian energy infrastructure; local media on Monday reported a fire at an oil depot in Russia’s Krasnodar region after a Ukrainian drone strike, though Russian officials had not confirmed details at the time of publication.
Guided bombs have become a signature weapon in strikes on Kharkiv because they can be released from aircraft operating inside Russian airspace, limiting Ukraine’s ability to intercept the launch platform. Civilian housing has repeatedly been hit despite Ukrainian air-defense upgrades supplied by Western partners.
Diplomatic stalemate
U.S.-led talks aimed at ending the war have not produced a durable ceasefire, and the United Nations has warned that civilian casualties are climbing as both sides trade strikes far from the front line. Zelenskyy has pressed allies for additional air-defense missiles and faster deliveries of fighter aircraft, arguing that protecting cities like Kharkiv requires interceptors as well as long-range weapons that can strike Russian launch sites.
Monday’s apartment strike is likely to feature in those appeals. Terekhov urged residents to heed air-alert apps and move to shelters when warnings sound, noting that many injuries occur when people remain in bedrooms or kitchens during the final seconds of an alert. Hospital officials in Kharkiv said they had activated surge staffing for trauma teams and were coordinating transfers for the most seriously wounded.
Russian officials routinely deny targeting civilians. Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said it had opened a war-crimes investigation into the Kharkiv strike and was collecting blast fragments and witness statements for an eventual international case file.