By Frank Jack Daniel
KYIV (Reuters) -Russian drones and missiles bore down on the Ukrainian capital early on Thursday, with officials reporting two deaths, 16 injured and fires in apartment and non-residential buildings as Washington resumed weapons deliveries to the war-torn country.
Escalating Russian attacks have strained Ukrainian air defences at a perilous moment in the war and forced thousands of people to seek bomb shelters overnight.
“Residential buildings, vehicles, warehouse facilities, office and non-residential buildings are on fire,” head of Kyiv’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, said on the Telegram messaging app.
Russia launched 18 missiles and around 400 drones in an attack which primarily targeted the capital Kyiv, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
There was no comment from Moscow about the attack, which came a day after Russia launched a single-night record number of drones targeting its smaller neighbour in what Ukrainians describe as terror tactics.
“Approaches to warfare changed a long time ago, and in its quest to break our society through terror, Russia has opted for combined strikes,” the head of Ukrainian presidential office Andriy Yermak said.
Russia says its attacks aim to degrade Ukraine’s military. The Russian defence ministry said its own air defence units had destroyed 14 Ukrainian drones overnight, RIA state news agency reported.
After U.S. President Donald Trump pledged earlier this week to send more defensive weapons to Kyiv, Washington was already delivering artillery shells and mobile rocket artillery missiles to Ukraine, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday.
Zelenskiy held a “substantive” meeting on Wednesday with Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, in Rome ahead of a Ukrainian recovery conference.
On Thursday, he will hold more meetings with American officials to discuss the adoption of the next package of U.S. sanctions against Russia in the near future, according to the Ukrainian foreign minister.
Trump has been growing increasingly frustrated with President Vladimir Putin, saying that the Russian leader was throwing a lot of “bullshit” at the U.S. efforts to end the war that Moscow launched against Ukraine in February 2022.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, the U.S. State Department and Russia’s foreign ministry said.
The Russian attack on Kyiv on Thursday rattled the city with explosions, Reuters’ witnesses said. Videos showed windows blown out, devastated facades and cars burned down. Ukrainian officials said that damage was reported in eight of the city’s 10 districts.
“I turned around and saw that the apartment was gone, and a fire had also broken out,” said Karyna Volf, a 25-year-old Kyiv resident who rushed out of her place moments before shards of glass went flying.
“This is terror, because it happens every night when people are asleep.”
Thick smoke covered parts of Kyiv, darkening the red hues of a sunrise over the city of three million, Reuters’ witnesses reported. Air raids in the capital lasted more than four hours, according to Ukraine’s air force data.
Closer to the battle zone, a Russian air strike killed three people and injured one late on Wednesday in the front-line town of Kostiantynivka in Ukraine’s east, the national emergency services said.
(Reporting by Gleb Garanich, Lidia Kelly, Ron Popeski, Yurii Kovalenko and Anastasiia Malenko; Writing by Ron Popeski and Lidia Kelly;Editing by Sandra Maler, Christopher Cushing, Saad Sayeed, Philippa Fletcher)
