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Waves of Russian drones and missiles, in and around Kyiv, killed 10 people overnight, including one child. The attacks lit up the night sky with fires in residential areas and damaged the entrance to a metro station bomb shelter, Ukrainian officials stated on Monday.
Rescue workers pulled bodies from the rubble of an apartment block in Kyiv’s busy Shevchenkivskyi district, less than a kilometre from the U.S. embassy. At least nine people died in the district, the interior ministry said.
Valeriy Mankuta, 33, described clambering from his window to the third floor below to escape after his building was hit by what authorities said was a missile. Reuters photos showed several explosions above apartment buildings in the area.
“There were bricks on me, there was something in my mouth. It was total hell. I woke up in the rubble,” said Mankuta, a construction worker.
At least 34 people including four children were wounded in the attacks on Kyiv, the emergency service said.
From midnight until almost dawn, the city shook with explosions and rattling machine gun fire from anti-aircraft units aiming at the drones.
Ukraine’s air force said it had downed 339 of 352 drones and 15 of 16 missiles launched by Russia in the attack on four Ukrainian regions.
In the area around the southern Black Sea port of Odesa, regional governor Oleh Kiper said the number of people killed in a separate missile attack had risen to three. Eight people were being treated for injuries.
Moscow has stepped up drone and missile strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities in recent weeks as talks to end the war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, yielded few results.
Monday’s strikes come a day before NATO’s annual summit is held in The Hague, while President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited Britain to discuss defence.
Thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict – the vast majority of them Ukrainian – although both sides deny targeting them. Russia has not commented on the latest attacks.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said people could still be under the rubble of buildings after the overnight attacks caused damage in six of the city’s 10 districts.
An entrance to the metro station in Kyiv’s Sviatoshynskyi district was also damaged, officials said.
Kyiv’s deep metro stations have been used throughout the war as some of the city’s safest bomb shelters.
Team BharatShakti
(With Inputs from Reuters)
