KYIV: Russia flattened a section of an apartment block in Kyiv on Tuesday, its deadliest attack on the Ukrainian capital this year, as a huge barrage of hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles killed at least 16 people and wounded 134.
Ukrainian officials declared a day of mourning on Wednesday for victims of what President Volodymyr Zelensky described as one of the most horrific attacks on the capital during the war.
“Such attacks are pure terrorism. The whole world, the United States, and Europe must finally respond as a civilized society responds to terrorists. (Russian President Vladimir) Putin does this solely because he can afford to continue the war.”
Zelensky said Russian forces had sent 440 drones and fired 32 missiles at Ukraine.
The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said it was the most deadly attack this year on Kyiv and underscored the dangers of using such weaponry in major cities.
“Last night’s attack exemplifies the grave threat posed by the tactic of deploying missiles and large numbers of drones simultaneously into populated areas, which leads to civilian casualties, and profound suffering,” Danielle Bell, Head of HRMMU, said in a statement.
Russia’s defense ministry said it had used air, land and sea-based missiles and drones to strike “objects of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine” in the Kyiv region and southern Zaporizhzhia province.
Ukrainian officials said about 27 locations in the capital were hit during several waves of attacks throughout the night, that damaged residential buildings, educational institutions and critical infrastructure.
A missile struck a nine-story residential building in Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district, wiping out a whole section of it, which was flattened into a pile of debris.
Emergency workers were combing through the rubble and dousing flames with hoses. They used a crane to lower a wounded elderly woman in a stretcher out of the window of a flat in an adjacent section of the building.
’SIMPLY HORRIFIC’
“I have never seen anything like this before. It is simply horrific. When they started pulling people out, and everyone was cut up, elderly people and children... I do not know how long they can continue to torment us ordinary people,” said Viktoriia Vovchenko, 57, who lives nearby.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Services said 14 people were killed and 117 were injured in the attack. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the dead in the capital included a 62-year-old US citizen, who died from shrapnel wounds.
Two people were killed and 17 injured in the Black Sea port of Odesa.
Ukraine has launched drones deep into Russia, although its attacks have not caused similar damage to civilian targets.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had intercepted and destroyed 147 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory, including the Moscow region, overnight.
Moscow has used drones and missiles to hit Ukrainian cities far from the front throughout the war. Its attacks have become more deadly in recent weeks, even as the sides have held their first peace talks in more than three years.
Oleksandr Kovalenko, a Ukrainian military analyst, said that since the start of June the Russians had turned to a new tactic of concentrating drone and missile strikes on a single city at a time to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses.
“It is a new challenge that we need to adapt to as soon as possible,” he said.
Russia’s full-scale invasion is now in its fourth year, and the hostilities have heated up in recent weeks as Kyiv and Moscow failed to reach any agreement during two rounds of peace talks in Istanbul.
Russian troops are pressing on with a grinding advance in eastern Ukraine and have opened a new front in the Sumy region in the northeast, despite calls for a ceasefire from US President Donald Trump, who promised to end the war quickly.
Zelensky was attending a summit of the Group of Seven nations in Canada to garner more support for tighter sanctions on Russia and continued military aid for Ukraine.
He had hoped to meet Trump, but the US president left the summit a day early, with the White House citing the situation in the Middle East.
Trump has reoriented US policy away from supporting Kyiv toward accepting Moscow’s justifications for its invasion, and has so far resisted calls from European allies to impose tighter sanctions on Moscow for rejecting his calls for a ceasefire.
At the summit, Trump said it was a mistake to expel Russia from the G8 group in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.
