A woman and her three children were killed in their apartment by a Russian missile in Kryvyi Rih (Kryvyi Rih in Ukrainian), the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Agence France-Presse reported, BTA reported.
Yesterday morning, the missile destroyed part of an apartment building, and in the evening the woman's body was found under the rubble. The emergency services published a photo of rescuers carrying the woman's body in a white sack. According to the prosecutor's office, she was 32 years old.
Rescuers then found the bodies of her three children, the prosecutor's office announced today. According to the children's grandmother, two boys aged two and ten and a two-month-old girl died. According to her, only the father survived because he was in another room at the time of the explosion. UNICEF said it was "devastated" by the latest tragedy, expressing alarm at the increasing number of children killed in Russian attacks in Ukraine in recent weeks.
"In the first 12 days of November, intense and sustained attacks killed at least four children and injured more than twenty," UNICEF said. According to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office, at least 589 children have been killed and 1,681 injured since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. This figure is largely underestimated due to the lack of access to areas occupied by the Russian army, or almost 20% of Ukrainian territory.
„Every night, children in Ukraine go to sleep in fear and uncertainty. When not in their beds, children hide in corridors and bomb shelters amid alarms and explosions, UNICEF said, expressing fears of further attacks. "This is an indescribable grief! Condolences to the relatives," Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubynets said.
The city council of Kryvyi Rih declared tomorrow a day of mourning in the city. The last such tragedy in Ukraine was in early September, when a mother and her three teenage daughters were killed by a Russian missile in their home in Lviv. In April 2022, a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in Odessa killed a three-month-old girl, her mother and her grandmother. The father, who was shopping at the time of the attack, later joined the Ukrainian army and was killed in combat in 2023, AFP recalled.