Russia launches first drone attack on Kyiv in almost a fortnight
Ukrainian officials said all the Iranian-made Shahed drones were detected and shot down.
Russia launched a drone attack early on Sunday on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, officials said. It was the first such attack in 12 days.
All of the Iranian-made Shahed exploding drones were detected and shot down, according to Serhii Popko, the head of the Kyiv city administration.
In addition to the city itself, the surrounding Kyiv region was targeted.
Kyiv regional governor Ruslan Kravchenko reported that one person was wounded by falling debris from a destroyed drone.
Further south, a 13-year-old boy was wounded in overnight shelling of Ukraine’s partially occupied southern Kherson province, said Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, spokesman for the Ukrainian administration of the province.
The child was wounded when the Russian army shelled the village of Mylove on the banks of the Dnieper River in the Beryslav district, Mr Tolokonnikov said.
“The child was hospitalised, there is no threat to his life,” Mr Tolokonnikov added.
Shelling of the Kherson province continued on Sunday morning, wounding four people in the regional capital, Kherson.
The regional prosecutor’s office said that a residential area of the city was targeted by Russian troops operating in the Russia-occupied part of the Kherson province.
“At least four citizens were wounded, two of them due to a targeted strike on a high-rise building,” the office wrote on Telegram.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military reported that the most intense fighting continued in Ukraine’s industrial east, with attacks focused around Bakhmut, Marinka and Lyman in the country’s Donetsk province, where 46 combat clashes took place.
In its regular update on Sunday morning, the General Staff said that over the previous 24 hours, Russia had carried out 27 airstrikes, one missile strike and about 80 attacks from multiple rocket launchers, targeting regions in the north, north east, east and south of the country.
In Russia, local officials reported that air defence systems shot down a drone over the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, while the neighbouring Kursk region faced shelling attacks. No casualties or damage were reported.
Following the drama of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion last week, Russian authorities remained defiant.
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, said on Sunday that Russian president Vladimir Putin came out of this situation “having strengthened his position even more both in the country and in the world”.
Russian society, he said, “having passed this test, has shown its maturity.” According to Volodin, there was “not a single example of someone supporting the rebellion”.
But general Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of the Russian group of forces fighting in Ukraine, was believed to have been detained days after the mutiny.
It is not clear whether the general, who has long-time links to Mr Prigozhin, faces any charges or where he is being held, reflecting the opaque world of the Kremlin’s politics and uncertainty after the revolt.
Independent observers and analysts say that Mr Putin may come out politically weakened after first announcing that Wagner would face harsh repercussions, only to later say that the group’s forces would not face prosecution. Mr Prigozhin was also allowed to leave Russia for Belarus.
