25 confirmed dead in Dnipro

Ukraine said there was little hope of pulling any more survivors from the rubble of an apartment block in the city of Dnipro yesterday, a day after the building was hit during a major Russian missile attack, with dozens of people expected to have died.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said a child was among 25 people confirmed dead so far and 73 people had been wounded, including 13 children. Thirty-nine people had been rescued but a further 43 were missing, he said on the Telegram messaging app.

Emergency workers said they had heard people screaming for help from underneath piles of debris from the nine-storey apartment block in the south-central city and were using moments of silence to help direct their efforts. Freezing temperatures added to rescuers' concerns.

A group of firefighters found a lightly-dressed woman still alive more than 18 hours after the attack. They carried her to safety in their arms as dozens of grim-faced residents, both young and old, watched in horror from the street.

A body had earlier been retrieved by firefighters and lifted from the ruins on a stretcher using a crane.

"The chances of saving people now are minimal," Dnipro's Mayor Borys Filatov told Reuters. I think the number of dead will be in the dozens."

Filatov said a Russian Kh-22 missile had struck the apartment block in the east-central, rocket-making city of Dnipro, destroying two stairwells totalling around 76 flats.

Russia fired two waves of missiles at Ukraine on Saturday, striking targets across the country as fighting raged on the battlefield in the eastern towns of Soledar and Bakhmut.

Moscow, which invaded last February, has been pounding Ukraine's energy infrastructure with missiles and drones since October, causing sweeping blackouts and disruptions to central heating and running water.

In a statement released yesterday about its previous day of strikes, the Russian defence ministry did not mention Dnipro as a specific target.

"All assigned objects were hit. The targets of the strike have been achieved," it said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that the military operation in Ukraine had gained positive momentum and that he hoped his soldiers would deliver more wins after Russia claimed control of the eastern Ukrainian salt-mining town of Soledar.

"The dynamic is positive," Putin told Rossiya 1 state television when asked about the taking of Soledar. "Everything is developing within the framework of the plan of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff."

"And I hope that our fighters will please us even more with the results of their combat," Putin said.

A spokesperson for Ukraine's southern command said Russia had fired only half of the cruise missiles it had deployed to the Black Sea during Saturday's attacks.

"This indicates that they still have certain plans," said the spokesperson, Natalia Humeniuk. "We must understand that they can still be used."

In his nightly address after the strike, Zelenskiy called on Western allies to supply more weapons to end "Russian terror" and attacks on civilian targets.

Saturday's attack came as Western powers consider sending battle tanks to Kyiv and ahead of a meeting of Ukraine's allies in Ramstein in Germany next Friday, where governments will announce their latest pledges of military support.

On Saturday, Britain followed France and Poland with promises of further weapons, saying it would send 14 of its Challenger 2 main battle tanks as well as other advanced artillery support in the coming weeks.

The first despatch of Western-made tanks to Ukraine is likely to be viewed by Moscow as escalation of the conflict. The Russian Embassy in London said the tanks would drag out the confrontation.