Kiev, attacked with kamikaze drones, this morning

Russia attacked Kiev again at rush hour on Monday morning, this time with kamikaze drones that hit residential buildings near the central train station in the Ukrainian capital, causing several fires and damage to blocks of flats, Reuters reports.

“Explosions in Kyiv. The capital was attacked with kamikaze drones’, declared Andrii Iermak, the head of the presidential administration in Kyiv, on his Telegram account. “The Russians think this will help them, but such actions are only their convulsions,” he adds in the same post. ‘We need more air defense and we need it as soon as possible!’ he says.

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Kliciko, communicated on Telegram about four explosions in the Shevcenkovski neighborhood in the center of the Ukrainian capital, according to EFE.

He also confirmed that it was a drone attack, posting a photo of one of them that he wrote “Geranium-2”the Russian name of the ‘Shahed-136’ drone.

As a result, Kliciko said, a fire broke out in a non-residential building and several residential buildings were damaged.

The mayor of Kyiv also stated that 18 people were rescued, while two others are still under the rubble, according to preliminary information.

“Rescue operations are underway. Demolition and removal operations of destroyed structures and rubble are also taking place”, he also said.

There are no immediate reports of any human casualties in the attack, which comes exactly one week after a barrage of Russian rockets fell on Kiev in the morning rush hour, in the heaviest attack on the Ukrainian capital since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 24 February.

A Reuters reporter saw fragments of a drone used in this attack with the inscription: ‘For Belgorod!’.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, located near the border with Ukraine, accused Ukrainian forces of regularly shelling the region, and gunmen killed 11 people on Saturday at a military training ground in the Belgorod region. Russian Telegram channels reported, citing a witness, that there were twice as many victims, around 30 dead.

Reuters reporters in Kyiv heard several explosions and saw smoke and flames rising from buildings on Monday. The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitshchko, said that several residential buildings were damaged.

A series of explosions were heard in the Shevcenkovski neighborhood shortly after 08:00 local time (05:00 GMT), when many people go to work and children head to school.
Explosions were heard in the same area about an hour before.

Television images, broadcast by Reuters, showed an aerial missile being fired into the sky while apartments in some buildings were on fire. The Kyiv city administration declared immediately after the first series of explosions that “critical infrastructure” had been attacked.

The Shevchenkovsky district in the center of the Ukrainian capital, where several universities, student bars, restaurants are located, had also been hit a week earlier.

Ukraine has reported a wave of Russian attacks with Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks. Iran denies supplying drones to Russia, while the Kremlin has not commented.

“Every night and every morning, the enemy terrorizes the population. Suicide drones and missiles are attacking the whole of Ukraine,’ said the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, on his Telegram account, according to EFE. ‘The enemy can attack our cities, but he cannot defeat us. The occupiers will receive a just punishment and condemnation from future generations. And we will get the victory”, states Zelenski in the same message.

Russia unjustifiably and unprovokedly invaded Ukraine on February 24, in what it calls a “special military operation”, in fact, according to Kiev and the West, a full-fledged act of aggression, the first of its kind since the Second World War.

Source: Agerpres / Photo: unsplash.com