Russia’s all-night drone attack on Kyiv injures 14, Ukraine says

Kyiv was struck by an overnight drone assault from Russia, resulting in at least 14 injuries, damaging railway facilities, and igniting fires in buildings and vehicles across the city, officials in the Ukrainian capital reported early Friday.

Over eight hours into air raid warnings and just before they were lifted at 5 a.m. (0200 GMT) Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported that 12 of the injured were admitted to the hospital. Damage was noted in six of Kyiv’s 10 districts on either side of the Dnipro River, and debris from drones ignited a medical facility in the green Holosiivskyi district, Klitschko stated on the Telegram messaging app.

The assaults represented the most recent in a sequence of Russian aerial bombardments on Kyiv that have escalated in recent weeks and featured some of the most lethal attacks of the conflict on the city of three million inhabitants.

U.S. President Donald Trump stated that a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday achieved no advancements in efforts to resolve the war in Ukraine, while the Kremlin emphasized that Moscow would continue striving to address the conflict’s “root causes.” A decision from Washington earlier this week to suspend certain deliveries of vital weaponry to Ukraine led to cautionary statements from Kyiv, asserting that this action would diminish its capacity to defend against escalating airstrikes and advances on the battlefield.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy expressed on Thursday his desire to converse with Trump on Friday regarding the provision of U.S. arms.

Ukrzaliznytsia, the largest carrier in Ukraine and state-owned railway, announced on Telegram that the strike on Kyiv affected railway infrastructure in the city, rerouting several passenger trains and leading to delays. During the hours leading up to Friday morning,

Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv’s military administration, said in a Telegram post that many of the targets had been dwellings. “At the same time, there is no end to the attacks,” Tkachenko wrote on Telegram. “There are a great many targets over Kyiv. We are working on Russian drones in all districts.”

Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.