Russia launches deadly attacks on Kyiv

Pavel Polityuk | October 18, 2022

At least three people have been killed as Russia launched drone attacks on the centre of Kyiv during morning rush hour.

Other fatalities have been reported after Russian shelling of other Ukrainian cities on Monday.

It is the second time in a week that Russia has unleashed strikes across Ukraine while its forces face setbacks on the battlefield.

Soldiers fired into the air trying to shoot down the drones after blasts rocked central Kyiv early on Monday.

An official in Ukraine’s presidential office said three people were killed in an attack on a residential building in Kyiv. Black smoke poured out of the windows of a blasted building and emergency service workers toiled to douse flames.

“I have never been so afraid… It is murder, it is simply murder, there are no other words for it,” said Vitalii Dushevskiy, 29, a food delivery courier who rents an apartment in the blasted building.

His flatmate, who gave his name only as Nazar, said they had tried to leave their apartment only to find the staircase “all gone”.

Nearby, Elena Mazur, 52, was searching for her mother, who had managed to call her to say she was buried under rubble.

“She is not picking up the phone,” Mazur said, hoping she had been rescued and taken to hospital.

Ukraine said the attacks were carried out by Iran-made ‘suicide drones’, which fly to their target and detonate.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had carried out a “massive” attack on military targets and energy infrastructure across Ukraine using high-precision weapons.

Reuters saw pieces of a drone used in the attack that bore the words: “For Belgorod” – an apparent reference to Ukrainian shelling of a Russian region bordering Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi later said there had been deaths in other cities too in Monday’s attacks.

The strikes came exactly one week after Russia unleashed its heaviest aerial bombardment of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities since the start of the war.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app that “the enemy can attack our cities, but it won’t be able to break us”.

“The occupiers will get only fair punishment and condemnation of future generations. And we will get victory,” he said.

The new United Nations human rights chief, Volker Turk of Austria, said drone attacks on civilians had to stop.

The US embassy in Kyiv also condemned the “desperate and reprehensible” drone attacks. Russia denies targeting civilians.

Iran repeated on Monday its denial that it is supplying the drones to Russia. The Kremlin has not commented.

Some European Union foreign ministers, gathering for talks in Luxembourg on Monday, called for new sanctions against Iran if Tehran’s involvement in Russia’s war on Ukraine is proven.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Russia should be expelled from the Group of 20 major economies and other international groups following the drone attacks.

“Those who give orders to attack critical infrastructure to freeze civilians and organise total mobilisation to cover the frontline with corpses, cannot sit at the same table with leaders of G20 for sure,” he wrote on Twitter.

Pro-Russian news sources on Telegram reported that Ukraine had struck Belgorod’s airport overnight. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv, which typically does not comment on incidents in Russia.

Elsewhere on Monday, renewed Russian shelling near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, caused it to be disconnected again from Ukraine’s power grid, Ukrainian state energy firm Energoatom said.

The plant, which has often been shelled during the war, is occupied by Russian forces but operated by Ukrainian staff.

In southern central Ukraine, a large fire broke out at an energy facility in the Dnipropetrovsk region after an overnight missile hit, a local official said.

Intense fighting is taking place around the eastern city of Bakhmut and the nearby town of Soledar, Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on Sunday.