Russia hits Ukraine's Kharkiv with deadly nighttime barrage of drones

A concentrated, nine-minute-long Russian drone attack on Ukraine's second largest city of Kharkiv in the middle of the night killed three people and injured 64, including nine children, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.

The overnight attack followed Russia's two biggest air assaults of the war on Ukraine this week, part of intensified bombardments that Moscow says are retaliatory measures for Kyiv's recent attacks in Russia.

Elsewhere, two southern Ukrainian regions, Mykolaiv and Kherson, were left without electricity on Wednesday after Russian forces attacked an energy facility, the governors said.

Kharkiv, in Ukraine's northeast, withstood Russia's full-scale advance in the early days of the war but has since been a regular target of drone, missile and guided aerial bomb assaults.

The intense strikes by 17 drones on Kharkiv sparked fires in 15 units of a five-storey apartment building and caused other damage in the city close to the Russian border, the city's mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

"There are direct hits on multi-storey buildings, private homes, playgrounds, enterprises and public transport," Terekhov said on the Telegram messaging app.

"Every new day now brings new despicable blows from Russia, and almost every blow is telling. Russia deserves increased pressure; with literally every blow it strikes against ordinary life, it proves that the pressure is not enough," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram.

A Reuters witness saw emergency rescuers helping to carry people out of damaged buildings and administering care, while firefighters battled blazes in the dark.

Nine of the injured, including a 2-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy, have been hospitalised, Oleh Sinehubov, the governor of the broader Kharkiv region, said on Telegram.

In total, the Ukrainian military said Russia had launched 85 drones overnight, 40 of which were shot down.

BLACKOUTS

In the southern Kherson region, workers were trying to restore electricity supplies after Russian forces attacked what its governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said was "an important energy facility".

"It is currently impossible to predict the duration of the work. Residents of the region, I ask you to show understanding and prepare for a prolonged power outage," he said on the Telegram messenger.

The governor of the neighbouring Mykolaiv region, Vitaliy Kim, said his region was also experiencing emergency shutdowns but that power would soon be restored.

Kherson region directly borders a war zone and is under daily drone, missile and artillery attack. The Mykolaiv region faces mainly missile and drone attacks.

There was no immediate comment from Russia on the latest overnight attacks.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched on its smaller neighbour in Feb 2022. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.