FILE PHOTO: Rescuers remove the body of a local resident at the site of a residential building heavily damaged by a Russian drone strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Odesa, Ukraine March 2, 2024. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo
KYIV (Reuters) -Rescue workers completed operations on Sunday after a drone strike on an apartment building in the southern city of Odesa, finding four more bodies and bringing the death toll to 12.
Odesa regional governor Oleh Kiper, writing on Telegram, said rescue teams working into Sunday evening had found the bodies of an eight-year-old girl, near the body of her older brother, uncovered earlier.
Rescuers earlier in the day recovered the bodies of a mother and baby.
Kiper said five of the dead in the Odesa apartment building were children, the youngest being four months old..
The drone crashed into a residential building in Odesa on Saturday. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said casualties could have been avoided if Ukraine had not faced delays in arms deliveries.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, posting on Telegram, said Russian forces had wounded 16 people in an aerial bomb attack on an apartment building in the eastern town of Kurakhove, west of the Russian-held regional centre of Donetsk.
Two of the injured were children. Dozens of apartment buildings sustained damage.
Klymenko said on Saturday an infant was found dead alongside his mother in the rubble of the Odesa building. He posted a photograph of a rescue worker next to a bloodied blanket, a baby's arm visible on one side and an adult arm extending out the other.
Sunday was declared a day of mourning in Odesa.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk;Editing by Alison Williams, Ron Popeski and Diane Craft)
