The head of the military administration in Kiev said early on Tuesday that at least one person reported was killed and four wounded in Russia’s third attack on Kiev on the 24th.
An hour, during which the Ukrainian Air Defense Forces destroyed more than 20 drones.
“The attack was massive, from different directions and in several stages,” Serhiy Popko added on Telegram.
In the second deadly attack on the Ukrainian capital in May and the 17th since the beginning of the month, officials said one person was killed when the wreckage of a drone fell on a high-rise apartment building, starting a fire.
An official in Kiev said Russia launched a series of attacks on the Ukrainian capital in May using a combination of drones and missiles, mostly at night.
The military administration in Kiev said that preliminary information indicates that Tuesday’s attacks were carried out only by Iranian-made Shahid drones.
“The enemy continues to attack the capital… These nocturnal explosions erupted in many areas of the city,” Klitschko said.
He stated that the falling debris hit several areas, including the historic Podil and Pechersky districts and the Svyatoshin district, as well as the Holoseevsky district in southwest Kiev.
Officials said the full extent of the damage was not yet clear.
The mayor of the Russian capital, Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, said that drones attacked the Russian capital on Tuesday morning, damaging several buildings.
Emergency officials said the drone attacked the upper floors of an apartment building in the city’s southwest.
They added that another drone targeted a 24-storey residential complex in southwest Moscow.
Sobyanin ordered the evacuation of residents from the two residential complexes that were targeted.
Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the Moscow region, said via Telegram that the air defenses shot down several drones while flying towards the city.
In the same context, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said in an interview with a French newspaper, “We have serious chances of achieving a breakthrough during the summer,” thanks to an imminent counterattack by his country’s army against Russian forces.
In an interview with French newspaper, Reznikov said, “We want to break the Russians’ resolve to win this war,” stressing that this counterattack aims to return to Ukraine’s “internationally recognized 1991 borders,” including Crimea.
The Ukrainian minister expected that this massive counterattack “will lead to a new retreat of the Russians from our lands… They have done a new mobilization process, but many of the soldiers are beginners who are inexperienced and don’t know how to use weapons very well”.
He added “the Wagner group used prisoners, and during the eight-month siege of Bakhmut, 60,000 soldiers were killed or wounded during the fighting,” without clarifying whether this outcome includes the two camps.
In the interview, Reznikov also stressed the urgent need for Ukraine to hand over weapons promised to it by Western countries.
He commented on the last American green light to allow allied countries to hand over American-made F16 fighters to Kiev.
Reznikov hoped that these deliveries would take place by the end of this year, noting that Ukrainian pilots would undergo several months of training to pilot them.
“In the meantime, we have to prepare airports in Ukraine, radars, navigation systems and air traffic controllers… It’s a complex system,” he said.
Reznikov stressed that his country needs a fleet of F16 aircraft that includes more than a hundred aircraft to confront the Russian air force and strike the rear lines of Moscow’s forces.
For his part, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union, Josep Borrell, said that he isn’t optimistic about the situation in Ukraine and that he believes that Russia won’t negotiate until it wins the war with Ukraine.
The European Union foreign policy chief added, during a forum of experts in Barcelona, Spain, “I see the clear will of Russia to win the war… Russia won’t negotiate until it wins”.
“I am not optimistic in my predictions about how this conflict might develop in the summer,” Borrell said, adding that the EU should “continue to strengthen its military aid to Ukraine”.
Borrell said earlier in Brussels that while he continues to coordinate European military aid to Ukraine, he doesn’t feel like the EU’s chief diplomat, but the EU’s defense minister.
