Kyiv (Reuters) – Moscow launched a “kamikaze” drone attack on Monday that hit key infrastructure in and around Kyiv as Russian President Vladimir Putin heads for Belarus, sparking fears he will pressure his former Soviet ally to join the movement. New. Attack on Ukraine.
Ukraine’s air force said its air defenses had shot down 30 drones, the third Russian air attack on the Ukrainian capital in six days, and the latest in a series of attacks since October that have targeted Ukraine’s power grid, causing blackouts amid a standstill. semi-frozen. Temperatures.
The Kyiv mayor said that no one was killed or injured in the attacks on Kyiv that rocked the Solomyansky and Shevchenkivsky districts of the capital, according to preliminary information.
“Kamikaze” drones are cheaply produced, disposable drones that fly toward their target before rapidly collapsing and exploding on impact.
A Reuters witness said that a fire broke out in the dark of the night at one of the sites at a power facility in the Shevchenkivsky district, in the center of the country, which was often targeted.
“I heard an explosion. Within three or four minutes, I heard another explosion,” said an elderly man who works as a guard at a nearby hospital.
Solomianskyi district in the western part of Kyiv is a busy transportation hub, home to a train station and one of the city’s two passenger airports.
Kyiv officials said 18 out of 23 drones were shot down over the city of 3.6 million people.
“As a result of the attack on the capital, critical infrastructure facilities were damaged,” Vitali Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app.
“Power and heating engineers are working to quickly stabilize the situation with power and heat supplies.”
Olessky Kuleba, governor of the region around Kyiv, said infrastructure and private homes had been damaged and two people were wounded. He said the attack caused “fairly serious” damage and that three areas in the area were left without electricity.
Zelensky again on Sunday called on Western countries to bolster Ukraine’s air defenses, after weeks of Russian air strikes targeting the power grid.
Orinego, the operator of Ukraine’s national power grid, said Telegram drones had targeted power plants across the country.
“Currently, the most difficult situation is in the central, eastern and Dnipro regions,” she added.
Belarus activity
There has been ongoing Russian and Belarusian military activity for months in Belarus, a close ally of the Kremlin that Moscow’s forces used as a launching pad for their failed assault on Kyiv in February.
Putin’s visit, for talks with Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, will be his first to Minsk since 2019 — before the pandemic and a wave of Belarusian protests in 2020 that Lukashenko crushed with strong Kremlin support.
Lukashenko has repeatedly said that he does not intend to send his country’s troops to Ukraine.
“During (these talks) questions of further aggression against Ukraine and broader participation of the Belarusian Armed Forces in the operation against Ukraine will be raised, especially, in our opinion, also on the ground,” said Serhiy Naev, commander of the Ukrainian Joint Forces. He said.
Russia’s Interfax news agency reported, citing the Russian Defense Ministry, that Russian forces, which moved to Belarus in October, will conduct tactical exercises in battalion form.
It was not immediately clear when they would start.
The 10-month-old conflict in Ukraine is the largest in Europe since World War Two, killing tens of thousands of people, driving millions from their homes and turning cities into rubble.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the armed forces were still holding out in the town of Bakhmut, which has seen the heaviest fighting in many weeks as Russia tries to advance in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
“The battlefield in Bakhmut is very important,” he said. “We control the city, although the occupiers are doing everything so that no wall remains undamaged.”
Denis Pushilin, the Russian official for the part of the Donetsk region that Moscow controls, said that Ukrainian forces had bombed a hospital in the city of Donetsk, killing one person and wounding several others.
Reuters could not independently verify accounts of the battlefield.
Putin describes what he calls Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine as the moment when Moscow finally stood up to the Western bloc, led by the United States, seeking to profit from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 by destroying Russia.
Kyiv and the West say that assertion is absurd and that Putin has no justification for what they see as an imperial-style war of aggression that has seen Russia now control about a fifth of Ukraine.
Moscow said on Monday that Russian and Chinese forces will conduct joint naval exercises between December 21 and 27, involving missile and artillery launches, in the East China Sea.
While the exercises have been held annually since 2012, Moscow has sought to strengthen its political, security and economic ties with Beijing in recent months and sees Chinese President Xi Jinping as a key ally in an anti-Western alliance.
(Reporting from the Reuters offices) Writing by Lincoln Feast and Nick McPhee Editing by Shri Navaratnam and Thomas Janowski
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