At least one person was killed and four wounded as Ukrainian air defence units fought off a Russian drone attack for the third consecutive night in and around Kyiv.
Ukraine’s air force spokesperson Yuriy Ignat said 20 Russian attack drones and two cruise missiles were shot down over Kyiv and elsewhere in the country in the early hours of Thursday morning.
“We have a successful air defence operation,” Ignat said. “Twenty Shaheds were destroyed – all those flying were downed. Two Kalibr cruise missiles were also destroyed.”
Emergency services responded to calls in the capital city’s Solomyanskyi, Shevchenkivskyi, Podilskyi and Darnytskyi districts following “explosions”, Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said earlier on Thursday.
“In Podilskyi district, during the firefighting in an apartment building, a body of one dead person was discovered,” Klitschko posted on the Telegram messaging app.
Kyiv’s military administration said falling debris from destroyed Russian drones had struck the Solomyanskyi district in the centre of the Ukrainian capital and at least two people were injured.
A picture posted on the official Telegram channel of the Kyiv military administration showed a room in a high-rise building with part of its wall blown out.
Klitschko also said material from downed Russian drones had damaged a residential building in the Darnytskyi district and caused a balcony fire in the Shevchenkivskyi district.
Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, described the assault as a “mass attack” by Iranian-made Shahed drones that had approached from multiple directions. Two people were wounded in Darnytskyi district “as a result of falling debris”, Popko wrote on Telegram.
“This night, Russian terrorists again resorted to a mass attack. The enemy attacked the Kyiv region with drones and missiles. The air alert lasted more than 3 hours,” Ruslan Kravchenko, the governor of the Kyiv region, said on Telegram.
Explosions were also reported in other regions of the country, including Khmelnytskyi in the west, Mykolaiv in the south and Zaporizhia in the southeast of the country.
In Mykolaiv, a Kalibr missile and several drones were shot down but a school and about 10 private houses were damaged by falling debris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office said.
There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties in other regions.
Earlier, Ukraine’s air defences reported shooting down 11 of at least 15 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched by Russia against Kyiv and other targets in the early hours of Wednesday. Russia also conducted air raids on Kyiv and other locations early on Tuesday, launching a wave of 28 Shahed drones, of which Ukraine said it destroyed 26.
The three days of night-time air assaults by Russia coincide with a NATO summit in Lithuania attended by world leaders and Ukraine’s Zelenskyy.
Though the Ukrainian leader did not secure a timetable for his country’s membership in NATO, Zelenskyy said the outcome of the summit would provide “a foundation of security” for Ukraine for the first time since independence.
