KYIV: A major Russian airstrike killed 16 people and injured more than 40 in Kyiv and the surrounding region on Thursday as President Volodymyr Zelensky said a failure by Ukraine's allies to replenish its stock of air defence missiles was costing lives.
Ukraine's air force said Russia launched dozens of cruise missiles, as well as ballistic and hypersonic ones, and 168 drones, in the massive overnight attack.
The air force said that nearly 90 per cent of the drones and most of the cruise missiles were downed. It did not specify how many ballistic missiles were launched and whether any were intercepted. Zelensky called Thursday's strike one of the most "cynical, calculated, and large-scale" of the four-and-a-half-year-long war. The upper floors of a nine-storey residential block were destroyed in Kyiv's Solomianskyi district, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. He called for Friday to be observed as a day of mourning. Overall, 30 residential buildings, a school, a children's hospital, and a kindergarten were damaged in the capital and the surrounding areas, Zelensky said. Private energy company DTEK said it had restored power to some 90,000 households that lost the supply after the attack.
The Russian defence ministry said Moscow attacked Kyiv and the surrounding region with airstrikes and drones, hitting facilities producing drone components, a military depot and a logistics hub, as well as other targets.
The Russian strikes also targeted a border crossing with Moldova in the Black Sea region of Odesa, where repeated attacks on ports and ships have brought Ukraine's vital agricultural exports to a virtual halt in recent weeks, pressuring global food prices.
As Russia has escalated its ballistic strikes in recent months, Zelensky has pleaded with allies to replenish Ukraine's stock of Patriot interceptors — the only weapon in its arsenal capable of downing a ballistic missile.
"The interceptors for Patriot systems have not yet been replaced, and they are needed everyday," Zelensky said on the Telegram app. "Each additional missile saves the lives of our people." Moscow, he said, would not seriously negotiate for peace as long as Ukraine had no missile defences to defend its cities. US-mediated talks to end the war stalled earlier this year as Kyiv refused to yield to Russian demands to cede more territory.
"Unfortunately ... the world's response to such attacks is not always adequate," Zelensky said.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on X, in response to Zelensky's message, that she was working with member states and partners to provide Ukraine with anti-ballistic capabilities as "the most urgent of priorities".
Ukrainian Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi said that some food warehouses and the facilities of the Red Cross around Kyiv were damaged in the attack, which lasted nearly nine hours. In recent weeks, fresh fruit and vegetables have occasionally disappeared from the shelves in some supermarkets in Kyiv as a result of strikes on logistics depots of food retailers.
At the missile-damaged apartment block in Solomianskyi district, an elderly woman wailed as rescuers carried out the body of her grandson, TV showed.
She stood sobbing beside his body after he was placed on the ground, before medics moved in to support her.
While most of the dead were in the Ukrainian capital, one person was also killed in the surrounding region, an official said on Telegram. — Reuters
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