Ukraine Live Updates: Russia Strikes Kyiv as G7 Summit Opens


Credit…Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

KYIV, Ukraine — The relative calm in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, was disrupted on Sunday morning when Russian missiles hit an apartment building, killing at least one person, officials said.

A 7-year-old girl was rescued from the rubble, the authorities said. Her father was killed, and her mother, a Russian citizen, was injured. The top three floors of the nine-story building in the Shevchenkivskyi district were destroyed, they said.

“There are people under the rubble,” Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said on Telegram. “Two victims were hospitalized.”

Residents of Kyiv reported four explosions Sunday morning, a day after a barrage of Russian missile strikes across Ukraine. The attacks came as leaders of the Group of 7 of the world’s wealthiest democracies prepared to meet in Germany, and Ukrainian officials said they believed Moscow was attempting to send a message to Ukraine and its Western allies.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted that the child rescued on Sunday “was sleeping peacefully in Kyiv until a Russian cruise missile blasted her home.”

“Many more around Ukraine are under strikes,” he wrote. “G7 summit must respond with more sanctions on Russia and more heavy arms for Ukraine.”

Yuriy Ignat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force Command, said that Russia had used long-range missiles fired by aircraft flying over the Caspian Sea, which lies more than 900 miles southeast of Kyiv.

Nataliya, 63, and her daughter Olha, 32, watched from across the parking lot of the apartment building as emergency workers sought to put out the fire. They carried a stretcher from the eighth floor down the stairway, which was exposed by the blast.

Nataliya, a medical doctor who asked that her surname not be used, said that she had recently returned to Kyiv to seek respite from intensified shelling in her home city of Kharkiv.

“It is like a nightmare,” she said to Olha. “When will it end?”

Credit…Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

Olha and her husband, Roman, 35, said they were waiting for further instructions from the police. They were worried that the glass in the window was broken and that looters would steal their belongings. “This neighborhood used to be known as the ‘quiet center,’” Olha said.

The authorities said they were evacuating 25 residents of the apartment complex.

Russian missiles also struck Kyiv in early June, injuring at least one person and upending weeks of relative quiet in the capital after Russian forces gave up their efforts to capture it.

Another explosion on Sunday damaged a kindergarten near the apartment complex, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister said on Telegram.

Dmytro Dzhizhinski had woken up to turn off the air conditioning in his apartment on Sunday morning. Moments later, the building was hit by a strike and he was thrown across the room.

“I live here, I wanted to return to the apartment that I bought and renovated,” said Mr. Dzhizhinski, 26, who had just made his way back from western Ukraine.

“I think I will stay, my apartment is OK,” he said. “But we understand it can happen at any moment.”

Megan Specia and Austin Ramzy contributed reporting.





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