At least three killed in Russian drone strikes on Ukraine’s Kyiv region

At least three people were killed in Russian drone strikes on Ukraine’s Kyiv region in the early hours of Friday morning, the acting head of the region’s military administration, Mykola Kalashnyk announced.

One person was killed and four more were injured when debris from a downed drone fell into a 10-storey residential building in the city of Fastiv, 60km southwest of the capital, Kalashnyk said. The impact caused a fire across several floors, prompting the evacuation of 150 residents, he added.

A married couple were also killed when drone debris struck a private home in the city of Brovary on the eastern outskirts of Kyiv, Kalashnyk said.

Kyiv’s police force said that it was “documenting the aftermath of the latest enemy attack” and had opened an investigation into Russian war crimes.

Ukraine’s Air Force said that Russia had launched a total of 58 drones at eight regions across the country overnight, with air defences intercepting 25 of them and a further 27 failing to reach their targets.

Russia was also subject to a large-scale drone attack overnight, with the country’s Defence Ministry reporting on Friday morning that its air defence systems had downed a total of 124 Ukrainian drones over 13 Russian regions as well as over Russian-annexed Crimea.

One of Russia’s largest microelectronics manufacturers, the Kremny EL plant in the western Bryansk region — where the Defence Ministry said 37 drones had been intercepted — was forced to halt operations due to drone damage, it told Russian state news agency TASS.

In the Ryazan region to the southeast of Moscow, drones struck the Ryazan Oil Refinery — one of the country’s largest, operated by state-owned oil company Rosneft — as well as the Novo-Ryazan Thermal Power Plant, Russian independent news outlet Astra reported. The region’s governor Pavel Malkov said that a private home had caught fire after being hit by falling debris but that its residents were unharmed.

Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency temporarily halted flights to and from 10 airports across the country, including three Moscow airports, with Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reporting that at least six drones had been intercepted as they approached the capital.