KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian drone strike killed a teenager in Kyiv during a nighttime barrage on the Ukrainian capital that lasted for hours, officials said, while five people were reportedly killed in a missile attack on central Ukraine that also left at least 21 injured.
According to Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko, the drone slammed into a 25-story apartment block Friday night in the city’s west, killing a 15-year-old girl and injuring five others. Ukraine’s Emergency Service said 100 people were evacuated following the strike, which damaged several apartments on the building’s upper floors.
Serhii Popko, who heads Kyiv’s local military administration, said that Russian forces overnight pummeled the city for 7 1/2 hours. Air raid sirens wailed throughout the night, and Popko said that Ukrainian air defense shot down up to a dozen Russian drones.
Also late Friday, a Russian missile hit a residential area in the central city of Dnipro, killing a 14-year-old and four others, said regional Gov. Serhii Lysak, adding that at least 21 others were injured including an 8-year-old and teenagers. The wife and teenage daughter of a local policeman were pulled dead from the rubble, police reported. The attack damaged over a dozen apartment buildings, private houses and a medical facility.
A man and woman died after a Russian drone dropped explosives on a village in the southern Kherson region, local prosecutors said, while two people in their 60s were killed by shelling in the Kharkiv province in the northeast.
In the Kyiv province, which surrounds but does not include the capital, flying debris from a drone attack killed a woman, Ukraine’s Emergency Service reported. A 13-year-old boy was wounded elsewhere in the region, it said.
Russian forces overnight launched a total of 91 drones and seven missiles at Ukrainian territory, Ukraine’s air force said Saturday in the latest of regular media updates. It said 44 of the drones were shot down.
In Russia, air defense brought down 17 Ukrainian drones over four regions near the border, the defense ministry in Moscow reported Saturday.
Also according to the Russian defense ministry, Moscow’s troops have continued eking out battlefield gains in Ukraine’s industrial east, capturing the hamlet of Oleksandropil in the Donetsk region.
Russia has been conducting a ferocious monthslong campaign along the eastern front in Ukraine, gradually compelling Kyiv to surrender ground. But Russia has struggled to push Ukrainian forces out of its Kursk border region following an incursion almost three months ago.