DNIPRO, Jan 16 - Ukrainian emergency crews on Monday sifted through what was left of a Dnipro apartment building destroyed by a Russian missile, placing bodies from one of the war’s deadliest single attacks in months in black bags and gingerly carrying them across steep piles of rubble.

Authorities said the death toll from Saturday’s strike rose to 40 and that 30 people remained missing Monday, The Associated Press reported. Tall cranes swung across the jagged gaps in a row of residential towers, the engines growling as residents of one of Ukraine’s largest cities watched largely in silence under a gray sky.

About 1,700 people lived in the multistory building, and search and rescue crews have worked nonstop since the missile strike to locate victims and survivors in the wreckage. The regional administration said 39 people have been rescued and at least 75 were wounded.

The reported death toll put it among the deadliest attacks on Ukrainian civilians since before the summer, according to The Associated Press-Frontline War Crimes Watch project. Residents said the apartment tower did not house any military facilities.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, called the strike, and others like it, “inhumane aggression” because it directly targeted civilians. “There will be no impunity for these crimes,” he said in a tweet Sunday.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned the Dnipro strike, saying “attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure violate international humanitarian law” and “must end immediately,” U.N. associate spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay said Monday.

The strike on the building came amid a wider barrage of Russian cruise missiles across Ukraine. The Ukrainian military said Sunday that it did not have the means to intercept the type of Russian missile that hit the residential building in Dnipro.

Fierce fighting continued to rage Monday in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk province, where military analysts have said both sides are likely suffering heavy troop casualties. No independent verification of developments was possible.

Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk province make up the Donbas, an expansive industrial region bordering Russia that Russian President Vladimir Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset. Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Kyiv’s forces there since 2014. (ap/ez)