Russia Launches 800 Drones, 13 Missiles Against Ukraine Overnight
KYIV (Dispatches) - Russia launched 805 drones and 13 missiles in an overnight attack on Ukraine, the Ukrainian Air Force said Sunday.
The air defense had intercepted 747 combat and decoy drones, along with four Iskander-K cruise missiles, said the Ukrainian Air Force in a Facebook post.
Five additional Iskander-K missiles, four Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missiles, and 56 drones struck 37 locations across the country, it added.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities said the Russian drone attacks triggered a fire in the country’s government building and “emergency crews are working to extinguish the fire.”
This has been the first time since the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict that “the government building, including its roof and upper floors, was damaged in the attack,” Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko confirmed on Telegram.
Svyrydenko added that apart from Kyiv, Russian strikes hit the cities of Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro, Kremenchuk and Odesa.
In the Ukrainian capital, the attack killed two people and wounded 20 others, according to city officials.
Those killed were a mother and her 3-month-old child, whose bodies were dug out of the rubble, said Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s city administration. At least 10 locations in Kyiv were damaged, he added. Direct drone hits struck a nine-story residential building in Kyiv’s Sviatoshynskyi district and a four-story residential building in Darnytskyi district.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Sunday that it used “high-precision weapons” and drones to strike drone assembly and storage sites, military air bases in central, southern and eastern Ukraine, an industrial facility and a logistics facility on the outskirts of Kyiv.
It comes after European leaders pressed Russian leader Vladimir Putin to work to end the war after 26 of Ukraine’s allies pledged to deploy troops as a “reassurance force” for the war-torn country once the fighting ends.
Zelenskyy has said he is ready to meet Putin to negotiate a peace agreement, and has urged U.S. President Donald Trump to put punishing sanctions on Russia to push it to end the war.
Moscow has repeatedly objected to any Western troop deplo
yments to Ukraine and pushed back against a Putin-Zelenskyy summit, saying lower-level talks must take place first.