Olha Smal, 62, was in her kitchen on the 12th floor of a Kyiv apartment block when the blast wave threw her across the room. One bedroom caught fire. Smoke filled the flat, and her pregnant neighbour was hurt. “You live one day at a time,” she told The Associated Press. “You don’t know what will happen to you tomorrow, or even what will happen today. It’s very, very hard.”
The drone hit a 22-story residential building in the Darnytskyi district overnight into Wednesday, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. It damaged the 11th floor and set the 12th on fire. Four of the wounded were in that building.
Across Ukraine, Russian missiles and drones struck six regions in the same raid, killing at least two people and wounding seven, Ukrainian officials said.
Zelenskyy’s appeal
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used the day to press other countries. “Unfortunately, there has been too little response from the international community to these strikes, which are taking people’s lives practically every day,” he wrote on social media. He added that Moscow “must not go into the winter believing that it can get away with missile and drone terror without consequences.”
Sanctions and attempts to isolate Moscow have not stopped the invasion. At the end of August, Russia carried out a week of night and daytime attacks on Kyiv, the heaviest sustained bombardment of the capital since the full-scale invasion began more than four years ago. The strikes have gone on this month. Ukrainian officials say they are meant to wear down civilian morale.
The United Nations said last month that more Ukrainian civilians were killed or wounded in July than in any month since March 2022: 437 dead and more than 2,600 injured. Its Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine counts more than 16,800 civilians killed and more than 51,000 wounded since the invasion. Moscow denies it aims at civilians and says it hits military-related targets.
What each side says it hit
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces struck a drone factory warehouse in Kyiv, fuel reservoirs and an electric substation in the port city of Mykolaiv, a ship bound for Odesa with military cargo, and logistics facilities at the Starokozache border crossing with Moldova. Ukrainian authorities said the border strike killed two people.
On Wednesday evening, a Russian drone hit the grounds of a shopping mall in Sumy and killed three people. Oleh Hryhorov, head of the Sumy regional military administration, called the strike “targeted.” Acting mayor Artem Kobzar said 14 people were injured.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine is answering with daily long-range attacks on infrastructure deep inside Russia. He said the latest ones hit Novorossiysk, a Black Sea port in the Krasnodar region, including a naval base, an oil-loading terminal, military port facilities and warships carrying cruise missiles. Krasnodar Gov. Veniamin Kondratyev said four people, one of them a child, died there and 29 were wounded.
Ukrainian drones also went after an unspecified industrial facility in Novy Urengoy in northwest Siberia, local authorities said. They said the attack was repelled, though falling debris started a fire. Meduza reported it was Ukraine’s first strike on the city, some 2,800 kilometers (1,700 miles) from the border. Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defenses shot down 596 Ukrainian drones from late Tuesday into early Wednesday.
Talks
Washington has renewed its push to end the war and sent special envoys to Kyiv and Moscow over the weekend. No substantial progress has come of it yet. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said late Tuesday that the talks were “substantive” but that much remains to be done.
Sources
- Zelenskyy urges more international pressure on Russia for civilian deaths
- Zelenskyy urges world to pressure Russia over deaths
