AFP

Smoke was rising from the blackened ruins of a residential building in Mykolaiv on Thursday after a Russian missile hit the centre of the southern Ukrainian city, killing at least two and injuring 19 including several children.

A team of rescuers removed a body from the rubble, carrying it wrapped in plastic sheeting to an ambulance.

Mykolaiv police said later that a 73-year-old man and his wife had been killed as the search operation continued.

Oleksiy Luganchenko, 72, who stood watching in the rain, said the dead couple were his sister and her husband, who lived on the second floor.

"Elderly people. Who were they bothering? Who needs this war?" he asked.

"I told them to leave, and now they have been killed."

Mykolaiv was hit overnight along with the nearby Black Sea port city of Odesa, where at least one man died and four people were injured.

Close to the site of the missile strike, firefighters put out a fire sparked by the blast. Nearby, an excavator cleared rubble as rescuers worked with spades, whistles and torches.

"During the night we saved two people from under the ruins," said a rescuer, Oleksandr, 44.

One local resident, Iryna Personova, 65, said the blast from the explosion threw her out of bed.

"Everything broke and shattered, the windows opened, the frames were blown off, the glass shattered," she said.

The 19th-century building in the old quarter of the city was purely residential, Personova insisted.

"The Russians are striking at residential districts... They are just hitting people," she said.

"There are definitely no (military) installations here, I'm sure about this."

She condemned Russia's leaders for the attack, which injured five children, saying "Putin is just a demon, evil."

Russia launched a missile attack on the city around 3:00 am local time (0000 GMT), the head of the military administration, Vitaliy Kim, wrote on Telegram.

International Red Cross worker Arkady Dabatyan said he had been at the scene since the early hours, giving first aid to casualties.

"Unfortunately we even treated a one-year-old child," he said.

The explosion hit close to the three-storey building and a nearby hotel rather than striking them directly, but the "explosion was so powerful that the (three-storey) building caught fire and then started to collapse," he said.

"There are a lot of injured civilians and children, mainly with shrapnel wounds."

A woman stood staring at the devastation, while other residents were sweeping up broken glass in their flats and nailing polythene sheeting to window frames to keep out the pouring rain.

AFP
AFP
AFP