In the aftermath of the Orthodox New Year and new massive Russian strikes, the list of people killed in a Dnipro residence continued to grow on Sunday.
Around 7 p.m., a report reported 30 dead and 75 injured, including a dozen seriously.
The night came, like the previous one, the emergency services continued to search the rubble of the building cut in two by the explosion.
"Between 30 and 40 people", according to still buried estimated in the evening Natalia Babachenko, adviser to the head of the military administration of the Dnipropetrovsk region.
“In the afternoon, a 27-year-old woman was pulled out of the rubble.
She's in intensive care with severe hypothermia.
Doctors are fighting to save her,” Valentyn Reznichenko, Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, wrote on Telegram.
Makeshift kitchens were set up in the street, the Red Cross came to the rescue.
Neighbors brought warm clothes.
According to the Ukrainian presidency, between 100 and 200 people are homeless following this strike, while the city was deprived of electricity.
A Russian missile split a residential building in Dnipro, eastern Ukraine, in two on Saturday.
REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced "Russian terror" on Saturday.
For the United States, this is "a new example of the brutal and barbaric war waged by Russia against the Ukrainian people".
In the south, in Kryvyi Rig, one person was killed and another injured on Saturday in the destruction of apartment buildings by a strike, according to an official report.
And on Sunday, Russian forces again heavily bombarded Kherson, hitting infrastructure and the premises of the Red Cross and injuring seven, including one seriously, according to regional governor Yaroslav Yanushevich.
Putin: “The dynamic is positive”
While his army seems to be struggling against Western-backed Ukrainian forces, Vladimir Putin assured that "everything is going according to plan", in an interview with Russian public television broadcast on Sunday.
“The dynamic is positive and everything is going according to the plans of the Ministry of Defense and the general staff.
I hope that our fighters will still delight us more than once with their military results", he launched, after a question from a journalist from the Rossia-1 channel asking him about the "news coming from Soledar”, which the Russian army claimed on Friday to have conquered.
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: Soledar, a week of confusion around a deadly battle
The capture of this small Ukrainian town was presented in Moscow as a success, after several months of Russian setbacks, in particular the withdrawals in the fall of the Kharkiv region (northeast) and the large city of Kherson (south) against Ukrainian counter-offensives.
According to Moscow, the conquest of Soledar is an important step to encircle the nearby city of Bakhmout, which the Russian army and the paramilitary group Wagner have been seeking to conquer for months.
On Saturday, the governor of the Donetsk region (east), Pavlo Kirilenko, however assured that Soledar was still “under Ukrainian control” and that “the fighting continues in the city and outside”.
NATO hopes to send more heavy weapons
But for NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Vladimir Putin "overestimated the strength" of his troops by invading Ukraine.
“We see their missteps, their lack of morale, their command problems, their bad equipment”, as well as their “heavy losses”, he told the German daily Handelsblatt.
“We are in a decisive phase of the war,” continued Jens Stoltenberg.
"Also, it is important that we provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs to win."
The United Kingdom announced on Saturday that it would deliver 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine "in the coming weeks", thus becoming the first country to supply heavy tanks of Western construction to kyiv.
“Recent heavy weapons delivery pledges are significant – and I expect there will be more in the near future,” he added, days before another coordination meeting. , on January 20, Western countries providing aid to Ukraine at the US base in Ramstein, Germany.
Western nations have long been reluctant to deliver heavier weaponry to Ukraine, fearful of being drawn into war or provoking Russia.
But at the beginning of the month, France, Germany and the United States finally promised to send armored infantry or reconnaissance tanks - 40 German Marders, 50 American Bradleys and French AMX-10 RCs.
The Kremlin has ruled that the deliveries of Western tanks will "prolong the suffering" of the Ukrainians.
