Hair-raising dashcam footage shows a missile narrowly missing cars on a busy highway in Kyiv this week — as Russia launched a pre-dawn barrage on the Ukrainian capital Thursday, killing three people, including a 9-year-old and her mother.
The harrowing footage shows the weapon falling out of the sky and knocking down traffic lights, before smashing into the ground in the middle of heavy traffic.
A white sedan nearly suffers a direct hit but swerves and speeds away.
Chunks of debris can be seen filling the air, sparking a fire in the middle of a traffic lane and sending plumes of thick, black smoke shooting into the sky.
Pieces of a destroyed traffic light are seen dangling above the road.
The terrifying incident happened Monday morning but the footage, obtained by Reuters, was revealed Thursday. It is unclear whether anyone was hurt in the incident.
Ukraine’s armed forces said they shot down 11 short-range Iskander ballistic missiles during Monday’s surprise daytime attack.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and first lady Olena Zelenska both posted a video of what they said were frightened schoolchildren running and screaming down a Kyiv street toward a bomb shelter as sirens wail.
“This is what an ordinary weekday looks like,” the president wrote on Telegram.
Meanwhile, the latest onslaught Thursday, which Ukrainian officials said was carried out using short-range Iskander ground-launched missiles, was the highest casualty toll from a single attack on Kyiv over the past month.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that the dead included a 9-year-old girl, her mother and another woman.
The attack also coincided with events scheduled in Kyiv to celebrate International Children’s Day.
“Children’s Day has to be about safe childhood, summer, life,” Zelenska tweeted. “But today it is about new crimes of (Russia) against children.”
Yaroslav Riabchuk, who was waiting to enter a locked Kyiv air raid shelter when the missiles rained down, described the bloody scene.
“I ran, but then an explosion happened,” he said. “Shattered glass started falling, and I knew I had to run back. When I returned, it was over. There was a lot of blood, women, children.”
UN human rights monitors said six children were killed and 34 were wounded last month alone.
Ukrainian air defenses shot down all 10 cruise and ballistic missiles launched by the Kremlin’s forces Thursday, according to authorities.
Another missile attack in Kyiv Wednesday night killed three people, including an 11-year-old girl and her 34-year-old mother, regional police reported. Eleven other people were wounded.
