Ukrainian rescuers work to extinguish a fire in a residential building following a missile attack in Kharkiv on September 15, 2024, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Russia launched its eighth air attack in September on Kyiv overnight, with air defence units destroying nearly 20 drones that were heading towards the country’s capital, Ukrainian military said on Monday (September 16, 2024).

“Russian attack drones were heading to Kyiv from different directions and in different groups,” Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on Telegram. According to preliminary information, there were no casualties or damage in Kyiv.

The scale of the attack, which kept Kyiv under air raid alerts for about 3.5 hours, will only be known later on Monday (September 16, 2024), he added on the messaging app.

Reuters reported a series of loud explosions in what sounded like air defence systems in operation.

There was no immediate comment from Moscow. Russia says that it targets only Ukrainian infrastructure that is key to its war efforts in its air attacks.

At least seven explosions rang out on August 26 morning over the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, AFP journalists heard, amid a nationwide alert warning against Russian aerial attacks. File.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday (August 26, 2024) condemned Russia’s overnight and early morning barrage on his country as “vile” and said it involved over 100 missiles of various types and about 100 “Shahed” drones.

Ukraine’s leader said there were deaths and dozens of injuries and that the attack caused a lot of damage to Ukraine’s energy sector.

“Like most previous Russian strikes, this one was just as vile, targeting critical civilian infrastructure. Most of our regions — from the Kharkiv region and Kyiv to Odesa and our western regions,” Mr. Zelenskyy said.

The barrage began around midnight and continued after daybreak in what appeared to be Russia’s biggest attack against Ukraine in weeks.

Russian forces fired drones, cruise missiles and hypersonic ballistic Kinzhal missiles at 15 Ukrainian regions — more than half the country, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Monday (August 26, 2024) morning.

“The energy infrastructure has once again become the target of Russian terrorists. Unfortunately, there is damage in a number of regions,” Mr. Shmyhal said, adding that Ukraine’s state-owned power grid operator, Ukrenergo, has been forced to implement emergency power cuts to stabilize the system.

He called on Ukraine’s allies to provide Kyiv with long-range weapons and permission to use them on targets inside Russia.

“In order to stop the barbaric shelling of Ukrainian cities, it is necessary to destroy the place from which the Russian missiles are launched,” Shmyhal said. “We count on the support of our allies and will definitely make Russia pay.”

According to Ukraine’s air force, there were multiple groups of Russian drones moving toward eastern, northern, southern, and central regions of Ukraine, followed by multiple cruise and ballistic missiles.

Ihor Polishchuk, mayor of Ukraine’s western city of Lutsk, said a multi-story residential building and an unspecified infrastructure object were hit and one person was killed.

Another person was killed in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, where the attack sparked multiple fires, regional head Serhii Lysak said.

One person was also killed in the southeastern, partially occupied region of Zaporizhzhia, regional head Ivan Fedorov said.

Ukraine’s private energy company DTEK introduced emergency blackouts, saying in an online statement that “energy workers throughout the country work 24/7 to restore light in the homes of Ukrainians.” In neighboring Poland, the military said Polish and NATO air defenses were activated in the eastern part of the country as a result of the attack.