Kyiv residents look on Friday morning as emergency personnel work inside a nine-storey residential building in the city following Russian strikes overnight that killed at least six people. Photo by Maxim Marusenko/EPA
At least six people were killed and dozens injured in Kyiv overnight after Russian forces launched their deadliest strike against the Ukrainian capital in weeks.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a post on X, said children and a pregnant woman were among those hurt after the city was targeted with about 430 drones and 18 missiles in an attack “deliberately calculated to cause maximum harm to people and civilian infrastructure.”
Virtually every part of Kyiv was hit, including Podilskyi, Dniprovskyi, Solomianskyi, Sviatoshynskyi, Obolonskyi and Desnianskyi districts, where all the fatalities occurred.
Zelensky said dozens of apartment buildings had sustained damage and that falling debris from a downed ballistic missile had damaged the Aberbaijan Embassy in the attack which also targeted the Kharkiv and Odessa regions.
Six people, including a 7-year-old boy were injured elsewhere across Kyiv province, with Gov. Mykola Kalashnyk saying four of the casualties were hospitalized with head injuries, trauma, cuts and burns.
Ukrenergo, the state-run operator of the country’s electricity grid, said energy infrastructure was targeted with ballistic and cruise missiles as well as “many drones,” with the Energy Ministry reporting power outages in Donetsk, Kyiv and Odessa provinces.
The ministry appealed to consumers to be sparing in their use of electricity for the remainder of the day.
However, Ukrenergo head Vitaly Zaichenko warned it would take weeks to restore capacity, longer in the event infrastructure was targeted again.
“We are doing our best to repair the system. Without future attacks, we believe we will be able to recover all our energy consumption in three weeks.”
The attack came after Russia launched a massive attack targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure at the weekend using more than 500 “bomber” drones and missiles, causing extensive damage to facilities in Poltava, Kharkiv and Kyiv provinces.
State power generation company Centrenergo said it was “the most massive strike on our thermal power plants” in the three-and-a-half years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
At least six people were killed and dozens injured with most of the worst of the casualties occurring in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro.
