By Pavel Polityuk
KYIV (Reuters) -Russian drone and missile attacks in and around Kyiv overnight killed five people, injured scores, sparked fires in residential areas and damaged an entrance to a metro station that serves as a bomb shelter, Ukrainian officials said on Monday.
“The Russians’ style is unchanged – to hit where there may be people,” Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on the Telegram messaging app. “Residential buildings, exits from shelters – this is the Russian style.” Russia has not commented on the strikes.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched in February 2022, but thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict – the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
At least four people were killed in Kyiv’s busy Shevchenkivskyi district where the entire entrance of a residential high-rise building was destroyed, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram.
“There are still people under the rubble,” Klymenko said.
The attack caused damage in six of the city’s 10 districts, including in several apartment buildings, and wounded at least 10 people, Klymenko said.
A 68-year-old woman was killed and at least eight people were injured in the attack on the broader Kyiv region that surrounds the Ukrainian capital, its governor Mykola Kalashnik said on Telegram.
Photos posted by Ukraine’s State Emergency Service showed rescuers leading people to safety from several buildings and structures on fire in the dark. The Service said a pregnant woman was among those rescued.
An exit to the metro station in Kyiv’s Sviatoshynskyi district was also damaged, as well as an adjacent bus stop, Kyiv’s officials said.
Kyiv’s deep metro stations have been used throughout the war as some of the city’s safest bomb shelters.
Russia’s deadliest attack on Kyiv last week with hundreds of drones killed 28 people and injured more than 150, with Ukrainian officials saying that nearly 30 sites were hit during the multi-wave attack.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Gleb Garanich; Writing by Lidia Kelly in Warsaw; Editing by Tom Hogue and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
