Kyiv: After a Russian military plane crashed near the Ukrainian border in Yeysk, Moscow on Monday stepped up attacks across Ukraine, cutting electricity and killing eight people, including in kamikaze drone strikes in the capital of Kyiv.
The plane struck a residential area of Yeysk, a town in southwestern Russia, according to Russian authorities.
Health minister Mikhail Murashko said three people had died and 19 were injured, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported, revising an earlier toll of six dead given by the ministry of emergency situations.
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- Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said Russia launched five strikes in Kyiv and against energy facilities in Sumy and the central Dnipropetrovsk regions, knocking out electricity to hundreds of towns and villages.
- Ukraine said four people were killed in Kyiv, including a married couple expecting a baby, and another four in the northeast region of Sumy.
- Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba demanded EU sanctions on Iran, accusing Tehran of providing Russia with drones.
- An AFP journalist saw drones swooping low over central Kyiv on Monday as police tried to shoot them down with automatic weapons and smoke rose from explosions across the city.
- “I saw a bright orange splash… The house trembled,” said resident Tamara Beroshvili.
- Ukraine’s military said it shot down eight Iranian-made drones and two Russian cruise missiles on Monday.
- Iran denies exporting any weapons to either side, but the United States warned it would take action against companies and nations working with Tehran’s drone programme following the strikes in Kyiv.
- Call for Russia to be ousted from G20
- The strikes come exactly a week after Russian missiles rained down on Kyiv and other cities on October 10 in the biggest wave of attacks in months, killing at least 19 people, wounding 105 others and sparking an international outcry.
- “They seem to be hitting us every Monday now,” said taxi driver Sergiy Prikhodko, who was waiting for a fare near the central train station in Kyiv.
- “It’s a new way of starting the week,” he told AFP.
- Air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv shortly before the first explosion at around 6:35 am (0335 GMT), followed by sirens across most of the country.
- “Kamikaze drones and missiles are attacking all of Ukraine. The enemy can attack our cities, but it won’t be able to break us,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
- “Russia will not achieve anything with this form of terror even now when we still do not have a sufficient number of air defence and missile defence systems,” the president added.
- Senior presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak called for Russia to be excluded from the G20 following the strikes.
- “Those who give orders to attack critical infrastructure, to freeze civilians and organise total mobilisation to cover the frontline with corpses, cannot sit at the same table with leaders of (the) G20,” he said in a statement on social media, calling for Russia to be “expelled from all platforms”.
(With agency inputs)