Ukraine’s capital has endured what officials said was Russia’s largest drone attack of the war on Saturday, leaving five people wounded as the rumble of air defences and explosions woke residents at sunrise.
The attack began by hitting different districts of Kyiv in the early hours of Saturday, with more waves coming as the sun came up. The air raid warning lasted six hours.
Air force chief Mykola Oleschuk said 71 of the 75 drones launched at Ukraine had been shot down.
He praised the effectiveness of “mobile fire” units – usually fast pick-up trucks with a machine gun or flak cannon mounted on their flatbed. According to Mr Oleschuk, these downed nearly 40 per cent of the drones.
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Mayor Vitali Klitschko, writing on the Telegram app, said the attack had injured five people, including an 11-year-old girl, and damaged buildings in districts all across the city.
Fragments from a downed drone had also started a fire in a children’s nursery, he said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out that the attack had come in the early hours of the day when Ukrainians were commemorating their worst national tragedy – the 1932-33 Holodomor famine in which several million people starved to death.
“Wilful terror... The Russian leadership is proud of the fact that it can kill,” he wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine's leadership has previously drawn parallels between Holodomor and Russia's current invasion.
Ukraine and more than 30 other countries recognise the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people by the Soviet Union, which Ukraine was part of at the time.
Moscow denies the deaths were caused by a deliberate genocidal policy and says that Russians and other ethnic groups also suffered because of famine.
The target of Saturday’s attack was not immediately clear, but Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Russia will once again wage an aerial campaign to destroy Ukraine’s energy system, as it sought to do last winter. Ukraine’s energy ministry said nearly 200 buildings in the capital, including 77 residential ones, had been left without power as a result of the attack.
Mr Zelenskiy on Friday said Ukraine needed to secure three key “victories” abroad, including the approval of major aid packages from the US Congress and the European Union, and a formal start of accession talks to join the EU.
Mr Zelenskiy also announced the latest dismissals in the military, four deputy commanders in the national guard, but gave no reasons for their removal. The president and other officials have vowed to make the military’s operations more efficient and responsive to the needs of servicemen.
Twenty months into Russia’s full-scale invasion, fatigue has crept into the West’s relations with Kyiv, which heavily relies on its allies for military, economic and humanitarian aid to battle on against the Kremlin’s troops.
“We need three victories. The first one is the victory with US Congress. It’s a challenge, it’s not easy, but Ukraine is doing everything,” Mr Zelenskiy told a news conference in Kyiv.
President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve many billions of dollars in assistance for Ukraine last month, but Kyiv’s funding was omitted from a stop-gap spending bill passed last week, raising concerns it may not get through.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Justice Ministry has added Mikhail Kasyanov, who was President Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister but then became one of his opponents, to its register of “foreign agents”.
Russian law allows for figures and organisations receiving money or support from outside the country to be designated as foreign agents, a term whose pejorative connotations could undermine the designee’s credibility.
The law, which has been extensively used against opposition figures and independent news media, also requires material published by a designee to carry a prominent disclaimer saying it comes from a foreign agent.
The ministry’s website said Mr Kasyanov “took part in the creation and dissemination of messages and materials of foreign agents to an unlimited circle of people, disseminated false information about the decisions taken by public authorities of the Russian Federation and the policies pursued by them” and “opposed the special military operation in Ukraine”.
He became prime minister in 2000 after Mr Putin was elected to the presidency and served until 2004 when he was dismissed. He was primarily responsible for economic reforms, including Russia’s adoption of a flat income tax.
Mr Kasyanov became a prominent opposition figure after leaving office and attempted to run for president in 2008, but his candidacy was rejected by the national election commission. He later faded from view as Russia’s opposition weakened under arrests and repressions.
After Mr Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, Mr Kasyanov left the country and has been reported to be in Latvia.
Russia’s Gazprom has meanwhile said it will ship 39.7 million cubic metres of gas to Europe via Ukraine on Saturday, compared to 42.4 mcm on the previous day.
– Reuters