A missile hit a residential house in Dnipro late on 25 April, damaging the neighboring buildings, including the apartment of local journalist Vladyslav Malko. The journalist’s family were away at the time of the strike, Vladyslav Malko tells Kateryna Lysyuk, the Institute of Mass Information’s regional representative in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
Vladyslav Malko lives in another apartment nearby. It was damaged by the blast wave from the first hit.
“A window in one of the rooms was blasted out, it was my daughter’s room. I live with my youngest daughter, she’s 22. She wasn’t home at the moment of the strike: she was working the night shift. And thank God for that. After all, the glass of her bedroom window shattered and crumbled all over her bed. And the room I slept in wasn’t damaged at all. The windows in one room were blasted out, the kitchen windows warped, the windows in another room were damaged, and everything in my room stayed intact. Except for the drinking glass that was on the windowsill: it broke,” Vladyslav Malko said.
The media worker’s ex-wife lives in another apartment owned by the family. She was away during the weekend. The blast wave broke all the windows in the apartment, caused cracks in the walls, and tore out the doors.
“The place is now uninhabitable. And it’s fortunate that we were all elsewhere. What matters is that we were not there,” says the journalist.
Vladyslav Malko said that the following day, as they were digging through the rubble of the building that had been hit by the Russian missile, the first responders and everyone else repeatedly had to leave for the bomb shelter due to constant air raid alerts. During one, a Russian drone hit another building nearby.
“People were standing there, filling out documents, the police had set up tents, there was the State Emergency Service, and Proliska, and [charity] foundations had arrived bringing food. And then we see the SES responders running past, shouting, ‘Everyone, to shelters!’ And seconds later, maybe 15 or 10 after I got into the bomb shelter, a Shahed flew into the house next door. In our yard,” Vladyslav Malko said.
The journalist added that this was a huge stress for the whole family, but he was glad that no one had been in the apartment at the moment of the explosion.
As previously reported, the Russian drone strike in Dnipro city on 24 March 2026 damaged the apartment of Channel 5 correspondent Natalia Moskalenko.
