By Pavel Polityuk
KYIV (Reuters) -A Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv injured at least eight people, including a pregnant woman, and sparked fires at several high-rise apartment buildings in the city’s west and east, Ukrainian officials said early on Sunday.
Medics were called to the leafy Darnytskyi district to the east of the Dnipro River, where a four-storey apartment building caught fire from the debris of drones destroyed in the overnight attack, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
Klitschko posted on the Telegram messaging app that the pregnant woman and two other injured people had been hospitalised.
Drone debris also caused fires atop a 16-storey and two nine-storey buildings in the Sviatoshynskyi district in Kyiv’s west, he said.
Reuters witnesses heard a series of explosions shaking the city in what sounded like air defence units in operation.
Timur Tkachenko, the head of the military administration of the capital, said on Telegram that Russia was “deliberately and consciously striking civilian targets.”
Moscow did not immediately issue any comment on the attacks. Both sides deny targeting civilians in the strikes, but thousands have died in the war Russia launched with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
At 0115 GMT, most of Ukraine was under air raid alerts after Ukrainian Air Force warnings of Russian missile and drone attacks.
Tens of explosions shook the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, cutting power to parts of it, Mayor Vitalii Maletskyi said on Telegram.
With Ukraine’s western region under the threat of air attacks, Poland activated its own and allied aircraft to ensure air safety, the operational command of the Polish armed forces said.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Valentyn Ogirenko in Kyiv and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by William Mallard)
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