"No one is left", Russian missile tears through Ukraine community

Saying he had seen his neighbours only yesterday evening, Lubivskyi describes being woken up at 4.30 a.m. by an explosion -- one which tore through an apartment block, killing at least 15 people.

He ran to the front door but despite unlocking it, he couldn't open it. His bathroom and kitchen were in tatters, dishes and doors smashed. Smoke filled the air and he went to the balcony with his wife, where they stood until 7 a.m. when he was rescued by firefighters.

"My flat is on the seventh floor on the other side of that block. We felt the impact, we heard the explosion," he told Reuters, his speech broken in places where he struggled to make sense of what has just happened.

"My neighbours are gone, no one is left ... there is no one alive in the whole block, only the kitchens were left standing," he says, crying as he takes a deep drag from his cigarette.

Russia hurled missiles at cities across Ukraine as people slept early on Friday (April 28).

In Uman, firefighters battled a blaze at a residential apartment building that had been struck on an upper floor. Others tried to sift through the debris of the flats, much of it having destroyed cars parked nearby.

At least 15 people were killed and nine were taken to hospital, Ukrainian officials said.

Beginning late last year Russia launched such attacks roughly weekly, though they had tapered off as winter ended, with Western countries saying Moscow had used up much of its long range missile arsenal.

Moscow says it does not deliberately target civilians, but its air strikes and shelling have killed thousands of people and devastated cities and towns across Ukraine. Kyiv says strikes on cities far from the front lines have no military purpose apart from intimidating and harming civilians, a war crime.

"Russian bastards ... worse than animals," Lubivskyi said. "They don't care, the more people they kill, the more they want to kill, just because we don't want to work for them."

Reuters