Five people have been injured after Russia struck the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in what officials said was its largest drone attack of the war to date.
The attack began hitting different districts of Kyiv in the early hours of Saturday, with more waves coming at sunrise. The air raid warning lasted six hours.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said more than 70 Iranian-designed Shahed kamikaze drones had been launched at Ukraine, and that most, but not all, of them had been downed.
The air force later said it had downed 71 Shahed drones and one missile.
Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, writing on the Telegram app, said the attack had injured five people, including an 11-year-old girl, and damaged buildings across the city.
Fragments from a downed drone had started a fire in a children’s nursery, he said.
Zelenskiy pointed out that the attack took place on the day when Ukrainians commemorate their worst national tragedy, the 1932-33 Holodomor famine in which several million people starved to death.
“Wilful terror … The Russian leadership is proud of the fact that it can kill,” he wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine’s leadership has previously drawn parallels between Holodomor and Russia’s current invasion.
Ukraine and more than 30 other countries recognise Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people by the Soviet Union, which ruled Ukraine at the time and sought to crush its desire for independence. Moscow denies the deaths were caused by a deliberate genocidal policy and says Russians and other ethnic groups also suffered because of famine.
The target of Saturday’s attack was not immediately clear, but Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Russia will once again wage an aerial campaign to try to destroy Ukraine’s energy system, as it sought to do last winter.
Ukraine’s energy ministry said nearly 200 buildings in the capital, including 77 residential ones, had been left without power as a result of the attack.
“It looks like tonight we heard the overture. The prelude to the winter season,” Serhiy Fursa, a prominent Ukrainian economist, wrote on Facebook.
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