(FiveNation.com)- Last Saturday, an apartment block in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro was turned to rubble when it was hit by a Russian missile in one of the worst attacks on civilians since the start of the war.
By last Thursday, the death toll from the January 14 attack had reached 46, according to Valentyn Reznhichenko, the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration. Eleven of the dead were still unidentified while 11 others remain missing.
The missile attack injured another 80 people, 24 of whom remained hospitalized by the end of last week. Three of those, including a 9-year-old girl, remain in serious condition.
Throughout last weekend, rescue crews were digging through the rubble searching for survivors trapped under what remains of the nine-story apartment block that housed around 1,700 people.
But once the majority of the rubble was removed, the search for survivors changed to a search for bodies.
The sheer force of last Saturday’s missile strike, which Ukrainian officials say was caused by a Russian Kh-22 missile, likely incinerated some of the victims. Others were dismembered or left otherwise unidentifiable.
The attack destroyed over 70 apartments that housed not only local residents but also those who had fled some of the harshest fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Among the dead are a mother and father who fled the city of Nikopol with their children. The children, ages 14 and 9, were injured in the attack. Another displaced person, a 73-year-old woman who fled eastern Donetsk, was in her fourth-floor apartment at the time of the missile strike but so far, her body has not been recovered.
Rescue workers helped retrieve another woman from the fourth floor of the building who had been home with her husband and baby. But by the time the team got to their apartment last Sunday, the baby had died of hypothermia. The woman’s husband had been crushed between floor slabs and did not survive.
