Russia's missile strike kills 20 in single apartment block in Ukraine

The death toll from Wednesday's Russian attacks across Ukraine has hit 28, with the worst damage coming from a single strike in Pryluky, a town in the northern Chernihiv region. A Russian missile tore through a five-storey residential building there, killing 20 people — including five children — according to regional governor Vyacheslav Chaus.

The scale of destruction was brutal. Rescuers spent hours digging through collapsed sections of the apartment block with shovels and excavators, hauling out 15 survivors and pulling wounded people from the rubble. Emergency crews used ladders to reach upper floors of what was left standing. About 55 people were injured in Pryluky alone.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn't mince words about it. He called the Pryluky strike one of Russia's "most vile" attacks, saying Moscow had deliberately aimed to inflict maximum pain. "The Russians wanted to strike painfully and demonstratively," he said. "This was one of the most vile strikes."

The Wednesday evening barrage wasn't confined to Pryluky. Kyiv prosecutors reported that falling debris from a drone killed two more people in a suburb of the capital. Russia's defence ministry claimed it had hit a cargo vessel bound for the Ukrainian port of Odesa and struck port infrastructure, though it offered no specifics.

The attacks add to mounting pressure on Ukraine's civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, Bulgaria's president Iliana Yotova pointed fingers at the war itself for making the Black Sea increasingly unsafe for commercial shipping. Two vessels were hit in the region early Tuesday — one sank, the other was damaged, and crews remain missing. Bulgaria has since halted search operations.

On the sanctions front, EU diplomats approved over 1,600 new designations targeting Russian entities on Wednesday. More than half focus on the military industrial chain, with special emphasis on those producing ballistic missiles.