Russian Missiles Hit Children's Hospital In Kyiv And Kill At Least 20 Elsewhere

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A major Russian missile attack across Ukraine killed at least 20 people and injured more than 50 on Monday, officials said, with one missile striking a large children’s hospital in the capital, Kyiv, where emergency crews searched rubble for casualties.

The Russian barrage targeted five Ukrainian cities with more than 40 missiles of different types, hitting apartment buildings and public infrastructure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a social media post.

Strikes in Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, killed 10 people and injured 37, in what the head of city administration, Oleksandr Vilkul, said was a massive missile attack.

At the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv, rescuers were searching for people under the rubble of a partially collapsed wing of the facility, Zelenskyy said, adding that the number of casualties was not yet known.

Vsevolod Dorofieiev, the senior instructor of a volunteer medical unit, said some people had died but he did not say how many or whether they were children or adults.

On social media, Zelenskyy said: “It is very important that the world should not be silent about it now and that everyone should see what Russia is and what it is doing.”

The attack comes on the eve of a three-day NATO summit in Washington, which will look at how to reassure Ukraine of the alliance’s unwavering support and offer Ukrainians hope that their country can come through Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.

At the children’s hospital, a two-story building was partly destroyed. On the hospital’s main 10-story building, windows and doors were blown out and walls were blackened. Blood spattered the floor in one room.

Medical personnel and local people helped shift the rubble