Russian missile strike kills family of five in Ukraine, Zelensky appeals for air defence

A Russian missile attack on the village of Radushne in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region has killed at least five members of a single family, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday. The strike, which officials said killed eight people overall, also destroyed two private homes and injured eight others, including an 84-year-old woman and two children pulled from the rubble alive.

“Today, the Russians destroyed an ordinary home of an ordinary family in Radushne near Kryvyi Rih in our Dnipropetrovsk region with a strike from their ballistic missile,” Zelensky wrote on social media. “It is definitively known that the parents and three children perished. The Russian missile strike was so powerful that almost nothing remained of the house… Under the rubble, fragments of human bodies were found, and only forensic examinations can determine to whom exactly in the family those bodies belong.”

Local defence council chief Oleksandr Vilkul confirmed that two private homes had been destroyed. The wounded include an elderly woman taken to hospital and two children who were rescued from the debris.

The attack comes shortly after Zelensky met US President Donald Trump in Washington DC to urge the United States to grant Ukraine a licence to produce Patriot interceptor missiles, which are critical for defending against Russian ballistic missiles. Zelensky emphasised the need for international support, stating, “This Russian evil can only be stopped by the entire world. No one in the world can be left alone against such terror. And when we say that Ukraine needs missiles for 'Patriots', when we seek capabilities to defend against Russian ballistics, we are not talking about abstractions.”

Separately, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said an object that crashed into a field in eastern Poland in the early hours of Thursday was probably a Russian missile. Ukraine's acting Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha had earlier stated that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile had “crossed into Poland as part of Russia's massive strike against Ukraine, violating Nato airspace.”