Russia on Saturday morning launched the most intense drone attack on Ukraine since the start of its invasion in February 2022, which focused on the capital, according to Ukrainian military officials.
“kyiv was the main target,” Mykola Oleshchuk, commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, wrote on his Telegram channel.
In total, Russian forces fired around 75 Iranian-made Shahed drones over the country, of which 74 were destroyed by air defenses, according to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The incident was “the most massive drone airstrike on kyiv,” said Serhii Popko, head of the city administration.
Ukrainian air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat later confirmed that air defenses shot down more than 66 targets over the capital and nearby areas throughout the morning.
At least five civilians were injured during the offensive, which damaged several buildings, including a kindergarten. Among the injured was an 11-year-old boy, explained the capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko.
In the city’s Solomiansky district, debris left a crater in a courtyard in a residential area and the windows of a nearby building were blown out. Residents, mostly elderly, received medical care on site. Others took refuge in a nearby subway station. As they cleared debris and glass in the neighborhood, the drone of a new batch of drones could be heard nearby.
The assault began at 04:00 in the morning and lasted about six hours in several waves. It caused blackouts in 77 residential buildings and 120 institutions, Popko added. The Energy Ministry said that as a result of the attack, 17,000 people were without power in the kyiv region, adding that four power lines were damaged. The supply was restored in the early afternoon.
“Our soldiers shot down most of the drones. Unfortunately, not all,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram. “But we continue to work to strengthen our air defenses and shoot down more.”
The attack coincided with Holodomor Memorial Day, the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions of Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933, which is commemorated on the fourth Saturday of November.
In addition to kyiv, the Russian offensive also attacked the provinces of Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv and Kirovohrad.
Separately, shelling killed one person and wounded three others in the southern region of Kherson, its governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said Saturday. According to the president, the province had been bombed a hundred times in the last 24 hours.
