By Frank Jack Daniel
KYIV (Reuters) -Russian drones and missiles bore down on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv early on Thursday, with officials reporting two deaths, 13 injured and fires in apartment and non-residential buildings as Washington resumed weapons delivery to the war-torn country.
It was also the latest in Russia’s escalating attacks with hundreds of drones and missiles straining Ukrainian air defences at a perilous moment in the war and forcing thousands of people to frequently seek bomb shelters overnight.
“Residential buildings, vehicles, warehouse facilities, office and non-residential buildings are on fire,” head of Kyiv’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, said on the Telegram messaging app.
The full scale of the attack was not immediately clear. There was no comment from Moscow about the attack that came a day after Russia launched a single-night record number of drones targeting its smaller neighbour.
After U.S. President Donald Trump pledged earlier this week to send more defensive weapons to Kyiv, Washington was already delivering artillery shells and mobile rocket artillery missiles to Ukraine, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy held a “substantive” meeting on Wednesday with Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, in Rome ahead of a Ukrainian recovery conference.
Trump has been growing increasingly frustrated with President Vladimir Putin, saying that the Russian leader was throwing a lot of “bullshit” at the U.S. efforts to end the war that Moscow launched against Ukraine in February 2022.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, the U.S. State Department and Russia’s foreign ministry said.
Russia’s attack on Kyiv on Thursday rattled the city with explosions, Reuters’ witnesses said. Videos showed windows blown out, devastated facades and cars burned down. Kyiv’s officials said that damage was reported in six of the city’s 10 districts.
Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district, known for elegant restaurants, art galleries and vibrant student bars, suffered significant damage to residential buildings, the district’s head said on Telegram.
A thick smoke covered parts of Kyiv, darkening the red hues of a sunrise over the city of three million, Reuters’ witnesses reported. Air raids in the capital lasted more than four hours, according to Ukraine’s air force data.
“After returning home from shelters, keep your windows closed — there is a lot of smoke,” Tkachenko said.
Closer to the battle zone, a Russian air strike killed three people and injured one late on Wednesday in the front-line town of Kostiantynivka in Ukraine’s east, the national emergency services said.
(Reporting by Gleb Garanich, Lidia Kelly and Ron Popeski; Writing by Ron Popeski and Lidia Kelly;Editing by Sandra Maler, Christopher Cushing and Saad Sayeed)
