Komyushuvakha death toll climbs to 29 after Russian strike
Rescuers pulled bodies from the rubble of an aid facility in Zaporizhzhia as overnight missile attacks targeted power grids across nine Ukrainian regions.
By Amir Navarro ·
The number of people killed in a Russian attack on a humanitarian aid site in southern Ukraine rose to 29 on Tuesday. Forty-eight people remain missing as rescuers continue searching the blast site in Komyushuvakha, a village in the Zaporizhzhia region. White plastic sheeting covered the bodies of victims as they were carried away from the cratered remains of the destroyed facility and shelter.
Mykhailo Semikin, the acting head of the regional military administration, described the event as one of the worst tragedies for civilian casualties in the area since the start of the full-scale war. He stated in an online post that the scale of the loss was terrifying. The Zaporizhzhia region declared three days of mourning following the attack, which occurred on Monday. Semikin said Russian forces used bunker-busting bombs containing nearly 1.5 tons of explosives. The dead included four police officers and two rescue workers, and at least five others were injured.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia launched 289 attack drones, 17 ballistic missiles, and 59 cruise missiles at nine regions overnight. He noted that the barrage coincided with U.S. elections. Zelenskyy argued that the strikes were a signal that Moscow believed the United States would not notice. He called for international support to help Ukraine defend its skies to stop the missile attacks.
The overnight strikes caused emergency power cuts and damaged critical infrastructure. In the northeast Kharkiv region, a combined missile and drone attack wounded at least 62 people. Local authorities reported that a strike hit a medical facility in the Nemyshlianskyi district, shattering windows in four apartment buildings and damaging cars. Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the regional military administration, said more than 200 patients were transferred to other medical facilities.
Rescuers in the Dnipro area pulled a woman alive from the rubble on Tuesday morning. A Russian attack in that region had killed one person and wounded 17 others earlier in the day. Oleksandr Hanzha, the head of the regional military administration, said the strike damaged an outpatient clinic and a hospital, prompting the transfer of patients to other hospitals.
Russia's Ministry of Defense said it shot down 856 Ukrainian drones overnight. Sergei Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor, reported that 493 drones were fired toward the Russian capital. In the Russian city of Yaroslavl, regional Governor Mikhail Yevrayev said a Ukrainian drone attack wounded two employees at an oil refinery and damaged the facility's infrastructure.
Rolling blackouts have been implemented in the south, west, and east of Russian-occupied Crimea. Moscow-installed officials said the power outages followed attacks on energy infrastructure on Tuesday.
