Aid Strike

Rescuers in southern Ukraine raised the death toll Tuesday to 29 from a Russian strike on a humanitarian aid site. Forty-eight people are still missing, NPR reported.

The strike hit an aid facility and shelter in Komyshuvakha, a village in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region. Crews spent Tuesday digging through the crater. They pulled bodies out wrapped in white plastic sheeting, NPR reported.

"The scale of the tragedy is terrifying," Mykhailo Semikin, acting head of the region's military administration, wrote in an online post cited by NPR. He called it one of the worst tragedies for civilian deaths in the region since Russia's full-scale invasion began. Four police officers and two rescue workers were among the dead, he said.

DW had earlier put the toll at 26 in the same strike. The number climbed as search crews kept working through the rubble.

Officials declared three days of mourning in Zaporizhzhia. Russia used bunker-busting bombs loaded with nearly 1.5 tons of explosives in the attack, NPR said.

The strike on the aid site hit during a broader overnight barrage, one that covered nine regions. Russia fired 289 attack drones, 17 ballistic missiles and 59 cruise missiles, triggering emergency power cuts, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an online post reported by both France 24 and NPR.

Zelenskyy said the barrage coincided with U.S. elections. "The Russians think America won't notice this signal of theirs," he said, according to NPR. "But we need to notice and stop such terror. We need to help Ukraine defend its skies."

In Kharkiv, a combined missile and drone strike wounded at least 62 people, local officials said. A hospital and four apartment buildings sustained damage. More than 200 patients had to be moved to other facilities, regional administration head Oleh Syniehubov said, per NPR.

Dnipro saw a strike that killed one person and wounded 17. Rescuers pulled a woman alive from the rubble Tuesday morning. An outpatient clinic and a hospital were damaged, and patients were transferred elsewhere, regional official Oleksandr Hanzha said, NPR reported.

Russia's Ministry of Defense said it shot down 856 Ukrainian drones overnight. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 493 of those drones were aimed at the Russian capital, NPR reported.

"This is one of the worst tragedies in terms of the number of civilian victims in our region since the start of the full-scale war," Semikin said.