Kyiv: Russia has launched an overnight drone attack on Kyiv after a 12-day break, according to a senior Ukrainian official, with air defence systems preliminarily destroying all targets on their approach.
“Another enemy attack on Kyiv,” Serhiy Popko, a colonel general who heads Kyiv’s military administration, said in a post on the Telegram channel early on Sunday.
“At this moment, there is no information about possible casualties or damage,” he said.
The Reuters news agency reported blasts resembling the sound of air defence systems hitting targets in Kyiv.
The Ukrainian capital and a number of central and eastern Ukrainian regions were under air raid alerts for about an hour after 2am local time (23:00 GMT).
There was no immediate information about the scale of the attack.
It came a day after Ukrainian officials reported more civilian casualties from Russian shelling in the country’s east and south.
In the eastern front-line Donetsk region, at least three civilians were killed and 17 wounded on Friday and overnight on Saturday, according to Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko.
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that fierce clashes continued in three areas in Donetsk where it said Russia has massed troops and attempted to advance. It named the outskirts of three cities – Bakhmut, Lyman and Marinka – as front-line hot spots.
In Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, five people including a child were wounded on Friday as well as in overnight attacks, according to Governor Oleksandr Prokudin.
He said that Russian forces launched 82 artillery, drone, mortar shell and rocket attacks on the province, which is cut in two by a stretch of the 1,500km (930 mile) front line and still reeling from flooding unleashed by the collapse earlier this month of a major Dnipro River dam.
Agencies