Source : Perth Now news
Russian forces have resumed their drone barrage of Ukraine’s Kyiv region, hitting more than a dozen apartment buildings and storage depots in a second straight day of aerial attacks.
Prolonged air raids in Kyiv on Thursday essentially locked down the Ukrainian capital for 15 hours, the foreign ministry said, choking the economy and severely disrupting civilian life more than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.
Even longer alerts were a daily reality in regions closer to the front line, the ministry said.
Russian drone and missile attacks are also taking aim at the power grid in what Ukrainian officials say is an annual campaign to “weaponise winter”.
In Ukraine’s southern Kherson region on the Black Sea, where glide bombs a day earlier forced a combined heat and power plant to shut down, officials predicted a winter of extended outages and told people to move elsewhere if they could.
Russian strikes in the Kyiv region damaged 14 warehouses, 16 private houses, three apartment buildings and 16 vehicles, Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv regional military administration, said on Friday.
A second drone hit one location after emergency crews were deployed, the State Emergency Service said, in what is termed by the military as a “double tap” that targets first responders.
The attacks killed one person and wounded two others, according to officials.
The Russian defence ministry said its forces overnight struck a warehouse in the Kyiv region that stores Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missiles and fuel for rocket boosters.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately confirm the Russian claim, and The Associated Press could not verify it.
Recent strikes have damaged numerous warehouses across Kyiv and the wider region, including facilities storing books, food and other consumer goods.
The attacks stretched into daylight hours, and Tkachenko urged residents to stay in safe locations and heed air raid alerts.
Russia is launching small numbers of fast-moving jet-powered drones in waves in an attempt to paralyse the capital, according to Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defence Council.
“The goal is to exhaust air defences and the population,” he said on social media.
Russia fired 164 drones at Ukraine overnight, Ukraine’s air force said.
It did not mention missiles, which usually are part of Russia’s aerial attacks.
A 61-year-old man was killed and seven other people were wounded on Friday in a Russian glide bomb attack on the northern Sumy region, said Oleh Hryhorov, head of the Sumy regional military administration.
The Russian defence ministry said its air defences overnight shot down 512 Ukrainian drones over 18 Russian regions, as well as over illegally annexed Crimea and the waters of the Black Sea.
Ukrainian forces struck the Slavneft-YANOS refinery in Russia’s Yaroslavl region overnight, causing a fire, Ukraine’s General Staff said, as Ukraine continued its campaign against the Russian oil sector.
A fire broke out at the site, which is about 1000km from the border with Ukraine, the General Staff said.
A Ukrainian drone attack on Friday morning in the Yaroslavl region killed one person and wounded 27 others, governor Mikhail Yevrayev said.
Ten of those were wounded when drone debris fell on a bus, he said.
He said that unspecified “industrial infrastructure”, residential areas and unidentified retail facilities were hit.
In the Moscow region that surrounds but did not include the Russian capital, a drone hit a supermarket, damaging it and shattering windows in a nearby outpatient clinic, governor Andrei Vorobyov said on Telegram.
In the port city of Sevastopol in Crimea, four people were wounded when a five-storey residential building suffered significant damage from a drone, according to the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhayev.
