Russia pounds Kyiv with largest drone attack, hours after Trump-Putin call

USA Today

15 hours ago

KYIV, July 4 (Reuters) - Russia pummelled Kyiv with the largest drone attack of the war, killing one person, injuring at least 23 and damaging buildings across the capital hours after President Donald Trump spoke to Russia's Vladimir Putin, officials said on Friday.
Air raid sirens, the whine of kamikaze drones and booming detonations reverberated from early evening until dawn as Russia launched what Ukraine's Air Force said was a total of 539 drones and 11 missiles.
Families huddled in underground metro stations for shelter and acrid smoke hung over the city centre. Kyiv's military administration chief said on Friday afternoon a body had been found in the wreckage of one of the strike sites.
Outside a high-rise apartment block damaged by a drone, residents stood around surveying the scene as the clean-up job began. Some cried. Others looked on silently.
"I woke up to the sound of explosions, first the Shahed drones started buzzing, and then the explosions began," said 40-year-old resident Maria Hilchenko.
"Then people started screaming outside. The explosions from the Shaheds kept coming." Shahed drones are an Iranian design, a variant of which is now manufactured in Russia.
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President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called the attack "deliberately massive and cynical", noting the first sirens blared as news came in of Putin and Trump's call.
Later on Friday Zelenskiy spoke to Trump and the pair agreed to work on increasing Kyiv's capability to "defend the sky". He added they discussed joint defence production, as well as joint purchases and investments. The U.S. has paused some deliveries of missiles amid concerns about low stockpiles.
Kyiv officials said the attack damaged about 40 apartment blocks, passenger railway infrastructure, five schools and kindergartens, cafes and many cars in six of Kyiv's 10 districts. Poland said the consular section of its embassy was damaged in central Kyiv, adding that staff were unharmed.
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Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said a Chinese component had been found in one of the Shahed drones attacking Kyiv, adding it had been found shortly after China's consulate in the southern city of Odesa suffered minor damage in a separate strike.
"What an irony," Sybiha wrote on X.
Russian airstrikes on Kyiv have intensified in recent weeks and included some of the deadliest assaults of the war on the city of three million people.
Russia's Defence Ministry said drone factories, a military airfield and an oil refinery were among targets it struck in Kyiv with what it called high-precision weapons. Ukraine did not give details of any militarily valuable targets.
CALL FOR SANCTIONS
Trump said that the call with President Putin on Thursday resulted in no progress at all on efforts to end the war, and the Kremlin reiterated that Moscow would keep pushing to solve the conflict's "root causes".
The decision by Washington to halt some shipments of critical weapons to Ukraine prompted warnings by Kyiv that the move would weaken its ability to defend against intensifying airstrikes and battlefield advances. Germany said it is in talks on buying Patriot air defence systems to bridge the gap.
On Friday, Zelenskiy called for increased pressure on Moscow to change its "dumb, destructive behavior".
More: Russia continues record-setting aerial attacks, US cuts off arms shipments to Ukraine
"For every such strike against people and human life, they must feel appropriate sanctions and other blows to their economy, their revenues, and their infrastructure," he said.
Ukraine's Air Force said it destroyed 478 of the air weapons Russia launched overnight. Airstrikes were recorded in eight locations, with nine missiles and 63 drones, it added.
Social media videos showed people running to seek shelter, firefighters fighting blazes in the dark and ruined buildings with windows and facades blown out.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched with its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian. Many more soldiers are believed to have been killed on the front line, but neither side releases military casualty figures.
Late on Thursday, Russian shelling killed five people in and near the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, Ukraine said.
(Reporting by Olena Harmash, Pavel Polityuk, Max Hunder, Valentyn Ogirenko, Sergiy Karazy and Frank Jack Daniel; Writing by Ronald Popeski, Lidia Kelly and Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Stephen Coates, Raju Gopalakrishnan, Alexandra Hudson and Sharon Singleton)