KYIV : Russian missile and drone strikes killed at least
17 people and wounded dozens more in Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight,
authorities said Wednesday.
Kyiv was unable to shoot down any of the missiles launched
by Russia, whose intensifying attacks have prompted Kyiv to plead for more
US-made Patriot interceptors.
Russia has significantly upped its attacks on the
Ukrainian capital in recent months, typically firing salvos of
hard-to-intercept ballistic missiles in short blitzes that rock buildings and
send booms echoing across the city, reports BSS.
“Ballistic interceptors are what could have saved the
lives of those killed today,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said,
announcing 17 people had been killed.
A cloud of smoke hovered over the capital at sunrise, AFP
journalists saw, after the attacks sparked fires in several locations in the
region.
Over 40 people were wounded in the capital and its
surrounding areas, local authorities said.
AFP journalists heard explosions in Kyiv after midnight
(2100 GMT Tuesday), following Ukrainian air force warnings of incoming ballistic
missiles.
One journalist reported seeing dark smoke and the acrid
smell of burning lingering in the air hours later.
“The night was so terrifying, so hard,” Kyiv resident
Natalia Reutska told AFP in the morning after the attack.
“We’ve gotten used to waking up thinking, ‘we were lucky
today,’ and that’s very scary,” she added.
Ukraine shot down 98 of the 115 drones fired by Russia
overnight, the air force said.
But it was unable to shoot down any of the missiles,
preliminary statistics from the air force showed.
Kyiv can intercept the vast majority of drones, but still
relies on supplies from allies to counter missiles.
Zelensky has warned that Ukraine faces critical shortages
of air defences needed to counter missile attacks, particularly Russia’s
increasing use of ballistic missiles.
Moscow fired a record number of missiles at Ukraine in
July, an AFP analysis of Ukrainian air force data published Saturday showed.
The Russian attacks overnight mainly targeted warehouses,
Kyiv said, with some strikes on infrastructure and a railway station.
Eight people were killed in a strike on a train station on
the eastern edge of Kyiv, a local official said.
Logistics centres of the general merchandise chain
Epicentr were struck, burning one hub completely to the ground and killing an
employee, the company said.
Three people working at a postal sorting centre were also
killed.
Moscow said it hit “transportation, logistics, and
distribution centres in the city of Kyiv and the Kyiv region that were involved
in the storage, delivering various weapons and military cargo, as well as in
the production and distribution of unmanned aerial vehicles.”
Its own network of online retailer, Wildberries, has been
hit around a dozen times since mid-July by Ukrainian forces.
The series of strikes killed at least eight people and
have knocked out a large chunk of the company’s storage capacity.
Kyiv accuses the e-commerce giant—which employs tens of thousands of people and is sometimes referred to as “Russia’s Amazon”—of storing drone parts and helping the Russian army.
