A three-year-old killed and her family ripped apart in Ukraine missile strikes

The Russian attack killed Veronika in her bed on Friday morning, but left her childish chalk drawings of a happy family intact on the wall of their home.

They end only where the plaster was stripped off by an explosion and a fire that took the lives of the three-year-old and her mother, early on Friday morning.

She works in a shop, and said on Friday morning soldiers who stopped by for supplies told her they had removed an unexploded missile fragment from the damaged house.

That matched the damage to the house, where one wall was missing and there had been a fierce fire, but several walls and windows were still intact. There was no crater, which a cruise missile striking such a small house would be likely to leave behind.

Serhii Lysak, the head of the military administration for the Dnipro region, visited the shattered house to inspect the damage.

The young family had only become targets of a Russian strike because they were trying to protect themselves from missiles, said one neighbour, who asked not to be named.

They moved into the suburban house from their own apartment in the city, after a bloody strike on a Dnipro high-rise apartment building in January. The deadliest single assault on the city during this war, the missile killed at least 40 people and injured dozens more.