Russia launched a night-long drone attack on Kyiv, injuring at least 14 people and causing widespread damage to railway lines, buildings and vehicles across the Ukrainian capital, officials said on Friday morning.
More than eight hours into air raid alerts and just before they were called off at 5 a.m. (0200 GMT) Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that 12 of the injured were hospitalised.
Heavy Damage
Damage was recorded in six of Kyiv’s 10 districts on both sides of the Dnipro River bisecting the city and falling drone debris set a medical facility on fire in the leafy Holosiivskyi district, Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app.
The attacks were the latest in a series of Russian air strikes on Kyiv that have intensified in recent weeks and included some of the deadliest assaults of the war on the city of three million people.
Trump-Zelenskyy Talks
US President Donald Trump said that a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday resulted in no progress at all on efforts to end the war in Ukraine, while the Kremlin reiterated that Moscow would keep pushing to solve the conflict’s “root causes”.
A decision by Washington earlier this week to halt some shipments of critical weapons to Ukraine prompted warnings by Kyiv that the move would weaken its ability to defend against intensifying airstrikes and battlefield advances.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that he hopes to speak with Trump on Friday about the supply of US weapons.
Ukraine’s state-owned railway Ukrzaliznytsia, the country’s largest carrier, said on Telegram that the attack on Kyiv damaged railway infrastructure in the city, diverting a number of passenger trains and causing delays.
‘No End To The Attacks’
In the hours to Friday morning, Reuters witnesses heard strings of explosions and constant barrages of fire in Kyiv as air defence units tried to down the drones.
Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv’s military administration, said in a Telegram post that many of the targets had been dwellings.
“At the same time, there is no end to the attacks,” Tkachenko wrote on Telegram. “There are a great many targets over Kyiv. We are working on Russian drones in all districts.”
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
(With inputs from Reuters)
