At least 12 killed, dozens injured as Russia, Ukraine trade strikes
by Paul Godfrey · UPIJune 15 (UPI) -- At least four people were killed and dozens injured in a Russian airborne attack on Kyiv overnight in which the capital's 975-year-old UNESCO World Heritage Dormition Cathedral was badly damaged.
A number of multi-story apartment buildings in Kyiv were hit with a pregnant woman and two children, aged 5 and 6, among 30 people injured and more than 140,000 residents were left without power.
Tymur Tkachenko, the head of the capital's military administration, said in a post on Telegram that a 25-story tower block in Darnytskyi district was among several residential buildings hit in the 40 locations across the city that were targeted.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said Russia launched a total of 70 ballistic missiles and 611 drones targeting the country's central and eastern regions, called the strike on the cathedral "one of the biggest Russian crimes against Christian culture today."
Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, expressed outrage.
"The roof of one of the holiest places in the Christian world is burning. We ask for prayers for the salvation of the shrine from destruction. Another Russian crime against humanity, against history, against Christianity," he wrote online.
French President Emmanuel Macron condemned what he called an "attack on our universal heritage."
Authorities said firefighters had the blaze under control by Monday lunchtime and that significant damage to the interior and main structure had been averted.
Moscow said its forces were not responsible for the attack on the Dormition.
Five people died in the eastern city of Kharkiv, four of them emergency workers killed in a so-called double-tap missile strike as they were battling a blaze ignited in the initial earlier strikes using drones, according to Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Syniehubiv.
A Russian drone attack on the northeastern city of Sumy injured three people, including a child, and damaged a "non-residential" building, and at least one person was injured in a strike on the eastern city of Dnipro, Ukraine's fourth largest city.
Officials in the Russian city of Tula, 113 miles south of Moscow, said three people had been killed and three wounded, including a one-year-old child, in a Ukrainian drone attack.
Tula region Gov. Dmitry Milyaev said air defenses destroyed 16 drones above the province overnight.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its air defense systems downed another 107 Ukrainian drones over the Belgorod, Bryansk, Kaluga, Kursk, Oryol, Rostov, Ryazan, Smolensk, Tver, Krasnodar and Moscow regions, as well as Crimea.
Speaking to reporters near the Dormition cathedral, Zelensky said the death and destruction overnight could have been much worse had Ukraine not recently taken delivery of a shipment of American-made air defense missiles.
"Compared to recent mass attacks, the intercept rate for missiles was nonetheless relatively high, thanks to the recent arrival of much-needed interceptor missiles for the advanced Patriot air defense system. We had a package of missiles for Patriot, it was recently delivered to Ukraine. Thank God that this package arrived.
"Now, after we have used the corresponding missiles, we can talk about it. There were enough missiles to knock down the ballistics [missiles]," said Zelensky.