A Russian missile strike on the eastern Ukrainian city of Balakliia in the Kharkiv region has killed three people and wounded 10 others, including three teenagers, according to regional officials.
The attack took place overnight into Monday and hit the city centre, where two missiles struck close to multi-storey residential buildings. Local authorities said the blasts ripped through façades, shattered windows and set upper floors ablaze, while dozens of vehicles parked nearby were destroyed or badly damaged.
Vitalii Karabanov, head of Balakliia’s military administration, said 10 people were injured, among them three minors. According to Ukrainian media citing his remarks, the children were born in 2007, 2010 and 2011. Nine of the wounded were taken to hospital; local officials have not publicly detailed their condition.
Regional officials said the latest strike was part of a wider series of Russian attacks on the Kharkiv region and other parts of Ukraine overnight. Power supplies were disrupted in some districts, including the city of Izyum to the south, after earlier strikes late on Sunday. Local authorities there reported that a 14-year-old was injured in separate shelling.
Balakliia, a town south-east of Kharkiv city, was occupied by Russian forces from early March 2022 and recaptured by Ukrainian troops during the Kharkiv counter-offensive in early September that year. Since its liberation, the town has repeatedly come under attack, including a March 2025 overnight drone strike that hit a lyceum and damaged nearby apartment blocks, a primary health care centre, administrative offices, cafés and vehicles, according to regional authorities.
In a separate incident on 1 October 2025, one woman was killed and 10 people were injured when a missile struck another part of Balakliia, damaging an apartment building, a café, small shops and parked cars. Ukrainian police said they had opened criminal proceedings under national legislation covering violations of the laws and customs of war.
The wider Kharkiv region, which borders Russia and whose administrative centre is Ukraine’s second-largest city, has been a frequent target of Russian missile, drone and artillery strikes since 2022. In August 2025, Ukrainian officials reported that a ballistic missile strike on Kharkiv wounded 11 people and that, hours later, a drone attack on a residential block in the city killed seven people, including a toddler and a 16-year-old boy, and injured 23. In October 2025, officials said a drone strike hit a kindergarten in Kharkiv during morning hours, killing one person and injuring seven others, six of them children.
Ukrainian officials say such attacks are intended to erode civilian morale, disrupt essential services and drive further displacement from frontline and border regions.
Front lines in the east and south have shifted repeatedly, but much of Kharkiv region remains within range of Russian artillery and short-range missiles. Ukrainian forces are holding defensive lines in the oblast, including along the Kupiansk–Svatove sector, while Russian troops operate from positions across the border in Russia’s Belgorod region and in occupied areas of eastern Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.
Local authorities in Balakliia said rescue and recovery work was continuing on Monday after the latest strike, with firefighters, medics and emergency services remaining at the scene and calls about possible additional casualties still being received. Officials in Kharkiv region warned that the risk of further missile and drone attacks remained high across the oblast.
