AT least 10 people have been killed and dozens injured in a Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, which came just hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned of an impending “massive” attack by Moscow.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, writing on Telegram on Thursday, said 10 people were killed, while damage included six floors of an apartment building that had partially collapsed after a direct hit from a Russian projectile.
Tymur Tkachenko, the head of the capital’s military administration, said 56 people, including two children, were injured and three dozen locations across the city had been damaged in the attacks.
“Kyiv is under attack from ballistic missiles and UAVs,” Mayor Klitschko wrote earlier, using the acronym for unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.
Klitschko also reported people trapped in a damaged nine-storey residential building and the collapse of a large part of a high-rise apartment building that sustained a direct strike.
Russia has routinely launched waves of missiles and drones at Ukrainian cities, including the capital, during its more than four-year invasion. The war is Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
The Russian Defence Ministry said in a post on Telegram on Thursday that it carried out a “massive attack” on Kyiv and other locations using long-range, high-precision air-, land- and sea-launched weapons and drones.
The ministry said it hit military and energy facilities around Kyiv, as well as military airports in several regions including Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk, in what it called retaliation for Ukraine’s attack on civilian infrastructure.
Journalists with the AFP news agency in the central and eastern districts of Kyiv reported hearing more than a dozen explosions as Ukraine’s Air Force warned that ballistic missiles were approaching the city.
The deadly strikes on Kyiv came just hours after Zelenskyy said he was cutting a visit to Ireland short, warning of an imminent “massive Russian strike” and urging Ukrainians to take shelter.
“Today, we have information about another massive Russian strike; we have relevant intelligence data,” Zelenskyy said during a joint news conference in Dublin with Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin on Wednesday.
In a post on X, Zelenskyy said: “Immediately after this conversation, I am returning to Ukraine”.
He called on citizens to be “especially careful” and “stay safe and protect your families and children” by heeding air raid alerts.
“We know that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has been preparing a massive strike against Ukraine for some time. That is exactly the threat we are facing tonight,” he added.
Zelenskyy also accused Russia of “completely refusing to end the war” it launched in February 2022, despite Ukrainian efforts through “all possible official and unofficial channels” to convey readiness for “meetings and meaningful negotiations”.
Putin “sees only further aggression against Ukraine and against other neighbours and Europe as a whole”, Zelenskyy said.
Amid the attacks on Ukraine, neighbouring Poland, a NATO and European Union member, briefly scrambled fighter jets on Thursday as a preventive measure before calling them back, saying no airspace violation was recorded.