Russia has fired a fresh volley of missiles at targets across Ukraine, killing at least 12 people in the east-central city of Dnipro and cutting power in the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, officials said.
Saturday’s attacks destroyed a nine-story apartment building in Dnipro, reducing an entire section of the building to rubble and smoke billowing into the sky. Officials said a 15-year-old girl was among the dead.
About 64 others were also wounded.
“Tragedy!” said Borys Filatov, mayor of the rocket city on the Dnieper.
“I went to the side. … We’re going to walk through the rubble all night.”
Pictures from the scene showed firefighters putting out a fire around the carcasses of some cars in Dnipro. A large part of the block of flats was missing, while the rest of the building was badly damaged on the outside.
According to Ukrainian media reports, trapped residents used their mobile phone flashlights to signal their location under the rubble.
“They are texting all the time,” Mikhailo Lysenko, Dnipro’s deputy mayor, said in a social media video. “We occasionally interrupt our work to remain silent and we hear people screaming under the rubble.”
Regional governor Valentyn Reznichenko said seven children were among the wounded, the youngest three years old.
“The fate of 26 people is still unknown,” he added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it was not yet known how many were under the rubble.
“Unfortunately, the death toll is increasing every hour,” he said in his late night address.
In addition to Dnipro, Odessa in the south, Kharkiv in the east, Lviv in the west and the Ukrainian capital Kyiv were also hit on Saturday. Civilian infrastructure, including power stations, was again damaged and power outages were reported.
Power outages were imposed in “most regions” of Ukraine on Saturday due to the raids, Energy Minister German Galushchenko said.
He warned that the coming days would be “difficult”.
Officials said that the Kharkiv region was completely cut off from electricity supply and that power and water supply disruptions in Lviv are also possible.
Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with missiles and drones since October, causing widespread power outages and disruptions to central heating and running water.
Russia fired a total of 33 cruise missiles on Saturday, of which 21 were shot down, military commander-in-chief Valerii Saluzhny said.
Great Britain agrees to tanks
Moldova, Ukraine’s southwestern neighbor, said it found missile debris on its territory after recent Russian raids.
“Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine is again having a direct impact on Moldova,” President Maia Sandu tweeted, posting photos of the wreck.
“We condemn in the strongest terms today’s intensified attacks.”
In his late-night speech, Zelenskyy appealed to the West to supply more arms to prevent further deaths from what he called “Russian terror.”
“What is required for this? The kind of weapons our partners stock and our warriors expect. The whole world knows what and how to stop those who sow death,” he said.
Saturday’s attack comes as Western powers are considering sending heavy weapons to Kyiv and ahead of a meeting of Ukraine’s allies next Friday in Germany’s Ramstein, where the governments will announce their latest pledges of military support.
The United Kingdom became the first western country to pledge heavy tanks to the war effort on Saturday. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said his country will send 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine.
Sunak’s office said the British Prime Minister believes a “long and static war only serves Russia’s interests”.
“British defense and security officials believe a window has opened where Russia is lagging behind due to supply problems and falling morale,” the statement said. “The Prime Minister therefore encourages allies to deploy their planned support for 2023 as soon as possible for maximum impact.”
Saturday’s attacks came as Ukrainian and Russian forces fought for control of Soledar, a small salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine that has been the focus of a relentless Russian attack for days.
The capture of Soledar, which had a pre-war population of 10,000, could improve the position of Russian forces as they advance towards what has been their primary objective since October, the nearby Bakhmut transport junction.
Russia said on Friday that its forces had taken control of the city, but Ukraine has denied the claim.
Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from near Soledar, said there were no obvious signs of a Ukrainian withdrawal from the city.
“Russia says it has taken full control of Soledar, but the smoke billowing from the impact sites, the explosions of almost constant artillery and heavy machine gun fire suggest otherwise,” he said.
Army medics waited at intervals on the roads leading to Soledar to take the wounded away from the front line to hospitals, Stratford said. Ukrainian armored personnel carriers were seen transporting troops towards the city while the tree lines were filled with artillery in defensive positions.
A soldier asked for better weapons.
“It will be difficult for us to push them back,” he told Al Jazeera. “We will suffer great losses. They move in such numbers that sometimes our old guns overheat when we try to shoot as many as possible.”
Turkey said on Saturday it was ready to push for local ceasefires in Ukraine, warning that neither Moscow nor Kyiv had the military means to “win the war”.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s foreign policy adviser, Ibrahim Kalin, conceded that the warring parties were unlikely to be ready to finalize an “overarching peace deal” in the coming months.