A new wave of Russian drone attacks hit Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities on Monday, causing people to scramble for cover during the morning rush hour for the second successive week.
There was no immediate word of any deaths in the capital but residential buildings were set ablaze and damaged in attacks that also hit an area near a central railway station, witnesses said.
Air attacks were also reported on other cities including Odesa on the Black Sea, exactly a week after Russia launched the heaviest missile strikes since the early days of its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.
“All night and all morning, the enemy terrorises the civilian population. Kamikaze drones and missiles are attacking all of Ukraine. A residential building was hit in Kyiv,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
“The enemy can attack our cities, but it won’t be able to break us. The occupiers will get only fair punishment and condemnation of future generations. And we will get victory.”
A Reuters reporter saw pieces of a drone used in the attack that bore the words: “For Belgorod.”
The governor of the Russian region of Belgorod close to the border with Ukraine has accused Ukrainian forces of repeatedly shelling the region, and gunmen shot dead 11 people at a military training ground in the Belgorod region on Saturday.
Reuters heard several blasts and saw smoke and flames rising above buildings on Monday. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitshchko said several residential buildings had been damaged.
Several blasts hit the Shevchenkivskyi district shortly after 8 a.m. (0500 GMT), when many people go to work and children head to school.
Reuters television footage showed an air missile shooting into the sky as apartments burned.
Kyiv’s city administration said after the first wave of explosions that “critical infrastructure” was being attacked.
The Shevchenkivskyi district, a busy hub with universities, student bars and restaurants, had also been hit a week earlier in attacks that mainly targeted energy facilities.
MARINE TERMINAL HIT
In the city of Mykolaiv in the south, a drone hit the Everi marine terminal around 10 p.m. on Sunday night, damaging sunflower oil storage tanks and set aflame leaking oil, said Andriy, 47, a senior manager who declined to give his last name.
It took more than five hours to extinguish the flames ignited by the attack, the second on the storage facility on the Bukh River since June, said Andriy.
The terminal, he said, is the largest of its kind in Ukraine involved in exporting sunflower oil, of which the country is a major producer.
“This is an entirely civilian facility. There is no military,” he said, asserting that the attacks are part of a Russian effort to “destroy the economy and to destroy food security.”
Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s staff, said the latest attacks in Kyiv were carried out with so-called suicide drones.
“Russians think this will help them, but such actions are just their convulsions,” Yermak said on Telegram.
Ukraine has reported a spate of Russian attacks with Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks. Iran denies supplying the drones to Russia, while the Kremlin has not commented.
Russia denies targeting civilians in what it calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.