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Russia launched its largest drone attack of the war in the early hours of Saturday morning, targeting Kyiv in what Ukrainian officials fear is the start of a winter campaign aimed at destroying the country’s energy infrastructure.
Kyiv city authorities said five people were wounded while Ukraine’s energy ministry reported nearly 200 buildings, including 77 residential ones, were left without power as a result of the barrage.
Saturday’s attack began about 2.30am local time and lasted more than six hours, with Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones coming in waves and changing course during flight to confuse and evade defences, according to Ukraine’s air force.
Many of Kyiv’s more than 3mn residents awoke to wailing air raid sirens and push alerts on their phones urging them to seek shelter. The buzzing of the low-flying drones and staccato bark of air defence guns shooting at them was punctuated by loud explosions shortly before sunrise.
The air force reported downing 74 of 75 drones in the regions of Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad and Kyiv. Yuriy Ihnat, an air force spokesperson, said that 66 drones were downed over the capital and the surrounding region.
He added that waves of drones launched from the south-east “circled” Kyiv as they waited for drones that took off from the western Russian city of Kursk to approach the capital and attack it simultaneously.
A Kh-59 cruise missile was also destroyed in Dnipropetrovsk region, said Mykola Oleschuk, the commander of the Ukrainian an air force. He said that Ukraine’s “mobile fire” air defence forces, typically consisting of western-supplied ground-to-air missile systems mounted on US Humvees or pick-up trucks accounted for “almost 40 per cent” of the missiles and drones shot down.
Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said that debris from downed drones had crashed in several neighbourhoods, causing multiple fires, including a blaze at a high-rise apartment building and another at a kindergarten. He said five people, including an 11-year-old child, had been injured.
Photos published by Ukraine’s State Emergency Service showed large chunks of civilian buildings in Kyiv destroyed and a crater from a blast in a courtyard.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “The leadership of Russia is proud of the fact that it can kill,” calling the attack and its timing “conscious terror”. Earlier this month he warned Ukrainians that “Russia is prepared for winter.”
“We . . . must be prepared for the fact that the enemy may increase the number of drone or missile strikes on our infrastructure.”
Russia has mostly targeted Ukraine’s ports and grain-exporting infrastructure in southern Odesa region with large-scale missile and drones attacks this year. But it began targeting Kyiv in recent weeks, as temperatures dropped and the first snow fell over the capital.
Anticipating the bombardments and attempting to stave off the rolling blackouts they caused last winter, Ukrainian authorities have erected barriers of concrete blocks and cages filled with rocks and sand around critical infrastructure.
Ukraine is also relying on western-supplied air defence systems to protect the capital and its essential facilities.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told the Financial Times this month that Ukraine was far better prepared for Russia’s air attacks than last winter.
“As temperatures drop below zero in Ukraine, Russia cynically sends waves of Iranian drones to attack the capital and the country,” US Ambassador Bridget Brink wrote of Saturday’s attack on social media platform X.