KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday called for the world to help Kyiv defeat “Russian evil” as the death toll from a Russian drone strike on Odesa rose to 11, including four children.

A Russian drone hit an apartment block in the southern port city early on Saturday morning, partially destroying several floors and leaving more than a dozen people under the rubble. The attack killed at last four children, including two babies less than a year old, according to statements by Zelensky and the regional governor.

“Mark, who was not even three years old, Yelyzaveta, eight months old, and Timofey, four months old,” Zelensky said, naming the youngest victims of the strike in a post on Telegram. “Ukrai­nian children are Russia’s military targets,” he said.

Local officials said the toll could rise further as there were still people una­ccounted for more than 36 hours after the strike.

There was no comment on the attack in Moscow, which denies targeting civilians despite excessive evidence of Russian stri­kes on residential areas and the United Nations having verified at least 10,000 civilian deaths.

Ukraine’s emergency services said they had found the bodies of families huddled together as they sifted through the rubble on Sunday. “A mother tried to cover her eight-month-old baby with her body. They were found in a tight embrace,” the agency said on Telegram.

Ukraine’s interior ministry separately reported one death and three people wounded in the southern Kherson region, while police said an airstrike on a residential quarter of Kurakhove, a town in the eastern Donetsk region, injured 16.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2024