Rescuers pull bodies from rubble as Ukraine's death toll rises to 22 from a Russian missile strike

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Rescuers searched through the rubble of a residential building hit by a Russian missile in the northern Ukrainian town of Pryluky on Thursday as the death toll rose to 22, including five children, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.

The strike Wednesday in the country's Chernihiv region also injured 54 people, seven of them children, the agency said. In the immediate aftermath, rescuers had pulled 15 survivors out, including a child.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that a cruise missile directly hit the building in Pryluky, some 150 kilometers (93 miles) east of Kyiv, the country's capital.

The strike was part of a massive Russian missile and drone barrage on Kyiv and a dozen other regions on Wednesday, coinciding with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 74th birthday.

“This is the kind of ‘gift’ Putin gave himself for his birthday,” Zelenskyy said in a nightly video address Wednesday. “The killing of children, the killing of people.”

Zelenskyy warned that Russia will likely escalate daily missile and drone attacks as winter approaches.

Ukraine's energy company DTEK said the national grid operator Ukrenergo had ordered emergency power outages in Kyiv, and explained that this is separate from regular, rolling outages scheduled across the country and would not be applied during those shutdowns.

Russia and Ukraine are locked in a long-range aerial war while their armies remain largely deadlocked on the front line, more than 4 1/2 years since Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

Late Wednesday, Russian drones struck Kyiv’s Obolonskyi and Desnianskyi districts, police said.

In Obolonskyi, north of central Kyiv, a drone hit a courtyard between apartment buildings, killing two people and injuring seven, including a 12-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl.

In Desnianskyi, on the capital’s northeastern outskirts, a drone hit a residential building, killing two women and injuring five, among them girls aged 1 and 6.

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