Russia has unleashed 948 drones at Ukraine, leaving eight people killed and a UNESCO world heritage site on fire in its largest aerial attack in 24 hours.
Russia fired 550 drones in an unusual daytime assault on Tuesday, leaving two people killed and a maternity hospital damaged in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk, and another killed in the central Vinnytsia region.
The attack came after Russia fires 392 drones in an overnight barrage at residential buildings in several cities which killed another five people.
Chilling footage shared on social media shows the moment a drone struck the 16th-century Bernardine monastery in Lviv’s UNESCO-listed medieval centre. A fire erupted in a building next to the monastery and the 17th-century St. Andrew’s Church.
First responders and locals were seen sheltering inside a church in mid-attack, waiting for the all-clear to go back outside.
‘Absolute depravity’
“This is absolute depravity, and only someone like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin could find this appealing,” Ukrainina President Volodymyr Zelensky said of the attack on the historic western city of Lviv, which is far from the front.
“The scale of this attack makes it abundantly clear that Russia has no intention of actually ending this war,” he added, vowing Ukraine “will certainly respond to any attacks”.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s air force told AFP it was one of the biggest-ever daytime attacks on Ukraine.
“On such a large scale, it’s basically the first time. I don’t recall there being such daytime strikes with this number of drones,” said spokesman Yuriy Ignat.
Moscow has typically fired its barrages overnight in the four-year war, which started with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Housing and infrastructure hit
The daytime strikes on the centre of Ivano-Frankivsk killed two people and wounded four, including a six-year-old child, regional head Svitlana Onyshchuk said on social media.
Around 10 residential buildings and a maternity hospital were damaged, she said.
In the Vinnytsia region, one person was killed and 11 wounded, the regional head said.
In Lviv, at least 13 people were hospitalised.
Overnight, Russian missiles and drones rained down on residential areas and transport and energy infrastructure across Ukraine, local authorities said.
Five people were killed and dozens wounded in strikes across the central Poltava region, the eastern city of Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south.
The night-time attack also cut a key power line connecting neighbouring Moldova to Europe, forcing the country to declare a state of emergency.
Another power line to the southern Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was also cut, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported.
In Russia, authorities in the western Kursk region said a Ukrainian strike on a farm had killed one person and wounded 13.
Middle East war steals spotlight
The attacks come as Ukraine remains concerned it could struggle to repel relentless Russian aerial strikes as its supplies of US air defence systems dwindle amid the war in the Middle East.
A third round of US-brokered talks between Moscow and Kyiv aimed at ending Russia’s invasion has been derailed by the war in the Middle East.
Ukraine sent a delegation to the US last weekend in a bid to revive the negotiation process, but the effort yielded no immediate result.
Kyiv has been seeking to trade its anti-drone technology and expertise for conventional air defence missiles, which it urgently needs, and has dispatched around 200 of its military experts to Gulf countries facing Iranian drone attacks.
– With AFP
