Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones overnight into Thursday, killing at least eight people and injuring dozens more.
The intense strikes hit residential buildings and triggered a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.
Tymur Tkachenko, head of the capital’s military administration, said eight people had been killed, with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks. He did not elaborate.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko, writing on Telegram, said separately that 34 more were injured, adding that among the damages, the first to sixth floors of an apartment building collapsed after a direct hit.
Earlier he said that people were also trapped in a damaged nine-storey residential building and a roof of another high-rise apartment building was on fire.
Writing on Telegram, he urged residents to remain in shelters, describing an ongoing “furious enemy attack” on the capital.
The attack with ballistic and cruise missiles and drones affected all of the city’s 10 districts, on both sides of the Dnipro River. Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and other authorities issued the first warnings of the attack.
Carrying children, belongings, tents and pets, people crowded into underground stations, as air raid alerts were issued for most of Ukraine’s territory on Thursday amid Russia’s worst attack on the country since mid-June.
“Another horrific night for the residents of the city, who were forced to spend it in shelters,” Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, said in a post on X.
Russia conducted the massive attack on Kyiv and other locations using long-range, high-precision air-, land-, sea-launched weapons and drones, the Russian defence ministry said in a Telegram post on Thursday.
The ministry added it hit military and energy facilities around Kyiv, as well as military airports in several regions including in Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk, in what it said was retaliation for Ukraine’s attack on civil infrastructure.
Zelenskyy had earlier warned that intelligence reports showed an overnight attack on the country was likely and said he was cutting short his stay in Dublin, which he visited for the start of Ireland’s six-month term in charge of the rotating presidency of the EU.
Russia has intensified its attacks on Kyiv in recent weeks, even as Ukraine’s own long-range drone campaign against Russian military sites and energy facilities has caused fuel shortages and disrupted supply lines inside Russia.
Nato member Poland scrambled fighter jets as a preventive measure, the Polish armed forces said on X.
“These actions are of a preventive nature and are aimed at securing and protecting the airspace, especially in areas adjacent to the threatened regions,” the post said.
With Reuters and Associated Press
