A missile destroys a Pryluky housing block as the overnight toll hits the mid-20s

A missile hits a five-storey block in Pryluky on Putin's birthday

Russia fired a large overnight barrage of missiles and drones at Ukraine on Wednesday, and Ukrainian officials put the death toll between 25 and 28, including children. The heaviest loss was in Pryluky, in the northern Chernihiv region, where a missile destroyed a five-storey residential building.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 19 people died in that strike, five of them children, and that 25 people had been killed across the country, with about 100 injured. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi put the national death toll at 28. The two figures were both issued on Wednesday and have not been reconciled in public. Al Jazeera, citing earlier emergency counts, reported at least 14 dead and 50 wounded in Pryluky, including four children, which is the sort of gap that opens while bodies are still being pulled from rubble.

Zelenskyy noted that the attack fell on the birthday of Vladimir Putin. "This is the kind of birthday present that Putin gave himself: the killing of children, the killing of people," he said in his nightly address. He called it one of the most vile strikes of the war and said the Russians had wanted to hit painfully and on display. Ballistic missiles, he said, remain the hardest part of the defence.

What was fired, and what Kyiv says it stopped

Zelenskyy said Russia fired 70 missiles, many of them high-velocity ballistic weapons, and dozens of Shahed attack drones. Ukraine's air force gave a different mix: 130 drones, 48 cruise missiles, and an unspecified number of ballistic missiles. It said just over 80 percent of 46 jet-powered drones had been shot down. The two accounts can both be incomplete. One counts what the president was told overnight. The other counts what the air force logged by type.

In Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said two people were killed in the Darnytskyi district in a fire caused by the attack. Zelenskyy said civilians were also killed in the capital and in the central cities of Oleksandria and Kremenchuk. Private car garages in Kyiv were hit. Deputy mayor Danylo Savenko of Pryluky said there was a lot of destruction, especially in the town centre.

At the Pryluky block, several sections collapsed. Rescuers used an excavator, ladders and shovels. Emergency workers brought 15 survivors out of the rubble. That number, 15 extracted, sits next to the death counts and is the clearest picture of the rescue, not of the final toll.

Moscow's target list, and Kyiv's reply

Russia's defence ministry said its forces had carried out a massive strike with high-precision weapons and drones on military-industrial facilities. It named sites where the Ukrainian company Fire Point makes and stores Flamingo cruise missiles and medium- and long-range drones, in Kyiv and in the regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava and Kharkiv. It also said port and ship-repair infrastructure in the Odesa region had been hit, along with vessels it described as being used for the armed forces.

Zelenskyy said one of the key targets on the Ukrainian side of the ledger was energy infrastructure. He said Ukrainian forces had hit four targets in Russia over the previous 24 hours, including two oil facilities and a training ground, in the Perm, Samara and Astrakhan regions. In a Reuters interview he said Ukraine would hit Russian energy assets in reply to strikes on civilian infrastructure.

Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi spoke of channelling EU funds toward defence needs. He did not publish a new aid figure on Wednesday. The operational fact from the night is the split between a residential block in Pryluky and a Russian claim of military-industrial targets. Both can be true of a barrage this size. They are not the same claim, and the death toll that is not in dispute is the presence of children among the dead in a housing block.

The birthday detail is not a cause. It is a calendar fact Zelenskyy chose to put in the address. The cause, on the Ukrainian account, is a deliberate strike on energy and on cities. On the Russian account, it is a strike on plants that build Flamingo missiles and long-range drones. A reader can hold both lists and still see the unresolved arithmetic: 19 dead in Pryluky on the president's count, 25 nationwide on his count, 28 on the interior minister's, and 15 people pulled alive from the same block.