Published on •Updated
Russian missile strikes on Kyiv overnight have injured at least 11 people and sparked fires across the capital, authorities said on Saturday.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
In a series of posts on Telegram, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the city was under attack from ballistic missiles and warned residents to remain in bomb shelters.
“Early reports indicate a strike on a non-residential building in the Sviatoshynskyi district. A transformer substation is on fire in the Darnytskyi district. In the Solomianskyi district, a fire has broken out in a three-story office building,” he wrote.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at least 11 people, including one child, had been injured in the strikes, which he said had damaged apartment buildings, offices, and a seminary.
According to the Ukrainian air force, Russia launched six Iskander ballistic missiles, four Kh-59/69 cruise missiles, two Kh-31 anti-radiation missiles, and 121 attack drones at Ukraine overnight.
Local air defences intercepted 111 of the drones and two of the Kh-59/69 missiles, the air force said, citing preliminary data.
It comes after Moscow launched a major drone and missile barrage at Kyiv last week, killing at least 30 people and hitting more than 20 sites across the city.
Klitschko described the strikes as Russia’s “most massive attack” on the capital.
The Ukrainian air force said Russian forces used 570 air attack assets in the strikes, including four Zircon missiles, 24 Iskander ballistic missiles, and 496 Shahed-type drones.
Elsewhere, Russian strikes on the eastern Donetsk region killed seven and injured 21 on Friday, per local authorities.
In response to Russia’s attacks, Kyiv has been targeting Moscow’s energy industry, carrying out strikes on oil facilities such as refineries, depots, and terminals in an effort to hamper one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most critical sources of state income.
Ukrainian attacks have sparked a fuel crisis across Russia and Russian-occupied territories, with long queues at petrol stations and rising prices forcing Moscow to introduce a ban on diesel exports as it seeks to mitigate the impact to its economy and residents.
On Friday, Zelenskyy said his forces had struck an oil refinery in Omsk as well as a number of oil facilities across the Saratov, Rostov, Tver, Stavropol, and Krasnodar regions over the course of the week.
Despite these successes, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces has warned that a turning point in the war against Russia remained “a long way off”.
“The aggressor has not abandoned its plans for the complete occupation of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” he wrote on social media earlier this week. “They are seeking to expand their offensive operations in the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as to establish and expand a buffer zone in the northern regions of Ukraine”.
