Dozens die in Russian missile strike on Dnipro block of flats

When the missile hit, Anastasia Shvets’ apartment crumpled around her. By some freak of fate, she was the only thing left intact as she lay on her bed.

Sheets of concrete were suspended around her. A bathtub, incongruously, had appeared through the missing walls.

Sitting up, exposed to the cold dusk of a Ukrainian winter on the seventh floor of her destroyed building, she had no way of knowing what had happened to her parents in the next room.

 “I was covered in bed by a door,” she said. “Part of the kitchen was in the bedroom. In fact the bathroom, kitchen, corridor and pantry are no longer there.

“There was just a chasm, and through it I could see another doorway, someone else’s doorway.”

Shvets, 23, was the most visible survivor of the worst attack on a civilian target in the Ukraine war for months. Her parents were later pronounced dead.

The Russian Kh-22 rocket hit the nine-storey building in Dnipro at about 3.40pm on Saturday, in one of two volleys of missiles fired at Ukrainian cities. Rescuers described hearing the screams of people calling for help when they arrived. Two whole staircases, 72 apartments in all, had collapsed.

There was one success yesterday. A woman was found alive but in severe shock and with neck injuries. The bodies of her young child and her husband were found nearby. “She was under the remains of the block for almost a day,” leading fireman Gennady Terentev said. More children, including a 15-year-old girl, are thought to be among the dead.

“I was lying down on the couch and there was a sudden ‘whoosh’,” Galina Shapovaleva, 72, said. She had been alone in her seventh floor apartment at the rear of the block. “The building started shaking — it was terrifying.”

There is no obvious military target in the vicinity. Officials believe the target was the Prydniprovska power station, on the other side of the river.

In response to a national outpouring of support after Shvets’ picture appeared in the media, she described her experience in an Instagram post, in which she said she was still in mourning for her boyfriend Vlad, who had been killed fighting in the war in September. Her cat, Richard, was also killed in the missile strike. “I have no words, I have no emotions, I feel nothing but a great emptiness inside,” she wrote.

“Today I remember my father’s stupid jokes, and of taking stupid pictures of puppies with my mother today.

 “I now seem to be a star, although I didn’t ask for it. I’m published everywhere, but what I want is to go to my parents. It hurts. Do I even exist?”

Victoria Alekseyenko, 50, had a lucky escape — she had just gone to visit her mother-in-law when the missile struck. The first she knew of it was when her 17-year-old daughter, living with an aid organisation in Poland, rang in tears to see if her family was safe, after seeing her shattered apartment on TV.

Russia admitted firing missiles at “military targets”. Its defence ministry said “all assigned objects were hit”, making no mention of the Dnipro strike.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has also accused Britain of trying to “put out a fire with petrol” after Rishi Sunak confirmed he would send 14 Challenger-2 tanks and 30 AS90 self-propelled artillery guns to Ukraine. Britain will be the first Western country to send the heavy tanks Kyiv has been pleading for.

“Bringing tanks to the conflict zone, far from drawing the hostilities to a close, will only serve to intensify combat operations, generating more casualties, including among the civilian population,” the Russian Embassy in London said.