Emergency services are still busy searching the rubble of a building in search of survivors. kyiv is observing a day of mourning this Friday the day after massive Russian bombings which hit the Ukrainian capital during the night from Wednesday to Thursday, killing 24 people including three children, according to a new report. Forty-seven people are injured.
On the Russian side, Ukrainian strikes on the town of Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, left three people dead and 12 injured, local authorities announced on Friday. And the Russian army said it had shot down 355 Ukrainian drones during the night from Thursday to Friday, notably over border regions of Ukraine and that of Moscow.
In Ukraine, the missile and drone attack overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, which occurred 48 hours after the end of a three-day ceasefire to mark the celebrations of the end of the Second World War, is one of the bloodiest to have recently targeted the capital, more than four years after the start of the Russian invasion.
Reaction from Emmanuel Macron
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russia targeted Ukraine with 675 drones and 56 Russian missiles during the night from Wednesday to Thursday, of which 652 and 41 respectively were shot down by the defense.
This attack notably affected a dozen districts of the capital and its region. In Darnytskyi, a missile “literally leveled a residential building, from the first to the ninth floor,” lamented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday.
He accused Russia of having launched a total of “more than 1,560 drones” in less than 24 hours. “These are certainly not the actions of those who think that the war is coming to an end,” he wrote in an allusion to a remark made by his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on May 9.
Ukraine’s allies denounced this new attack, with French President Emmanuel Macron seeing it as proof of the “weakness” of Moscow, which “does not know how to end its war of aggression.”
“People were screaming”
In the south of the country, a UN vehicle was also hit by Russian drones on Thursday, with no injuries reported, according to Volodymyr Zelensky. “The Russians could not have been unaware of the vehicle they were targeting,” he denounced.
In Kiev, damage was recorded at more than “twenty sites across the city”, including civilian infrastructure, said the Ukrainian president. “Everything was on fire. People were screaming,” Andriï, a resident of the capital, testified to AFP, his shirt stained with blood.
While the emergency services were trying to evacuate a victim trapped under the rubble, a woman cried out in tears: “It’s probably Macha,” reported an AFP journalist on the spot.
A senior official of the Ukrainian presidency estimated that this new massive attack was “a demonstration on the occasion of (Donald) Trump’s discussions in China” with his counterpart Xi Jinping.
Talks between kyiv and Moscow, under American mediation, have been on hold since the outbreak of war in the Middle East at the end of February. The only concrete progress from previous negotiations are prisoner exchanges.
