Ukrainian rescuers were hoping Monday to find survivors under the rubble of an apartment building hit by a Russian missile strike which killed at least 15 people, as Moscow's forces seek to consolidate their control over the Donbas region.
The building was partially destroyed by the strike, AFP correspondents saw at the scene, where dozens of rescuers were sifting through the rubble with a mechanical digger on Sunday.
"During the rescue operation, 15 bodies were found at the scene and five people were pulled out of the rubble" alive in the town of Chasiv Yar, the local emergency service said on Facebook on Sunday.
ALSO READ - Ukraine urges Canada not to hand over gas turbine to Russia
"At least 30 others are under the rubble" of the four-storey building after it was hit by a Russian Uragan missile, Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said earlier on Telegram.
Rescuers had so far been able to establish contact with three people under the rubble, emergency services said.
"Everyone who gives orders for such strikes, everyone who carries them out targeting our ordinary cities, residential areas, kills absolutely deliberately," President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address, vowing that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.
One Chasiv Yar resident, who did not give her name, showed AFP journalists around the wreckage of her apartment."Yesterday, 11 or 10 o'clock in the evening, I was in the bedroom, and when I was leaving, everything started thundering and cracking...," she said.
"The only thing that saved me was when I ran here, because immediately afterwards all of this crashed down."
Another woman who had ventured inside to see what she could salvage from her apartment retrieved a bluebird, still perched in its cage.
Looking down from her balcony, where her pet had escaped the blast, she lifted up the cage with a brief, triumphant flourish.
