Russia launches first overnight drone attack on Kyiv in 12 days

KYIV (Reuters): Russia launched an overnight drone attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region after a 12-day break, with air defence systems destroying all the weapons on their approach, Ukrainian military officials said on Sunday.

The country’s air force said that the attack included eight Iranian-made Shahed drones and three cruise missiles which were shot down.

“Another enemy attack on Kyiv,” Serhiy Popko, a colonel general who heads Kyiv’s military administration, said in a post on the Telegram channel.

Three private houses were damaged as a result of falling drone debris in the Kyiv region, injuring one person, the military head of the region, Ruslan Kravchenko, said on his Facebook page.

Reuters witnesses heard blasts resembling the sound of air defence systems hitting targets. There was no immediate information about the scale of the attack.

Kyiv, its surrounding region and a number of central and eastern Ukraine’s regions were under air raid alerts for about an hour after 2 a.m. local time (2300 GMT).