At least five explosions were heard in the centre of Kyiv early on Monday, as Russia conducted renewed strikes on the Ukrainian capital with kamikaze drones, one week after it hammered the country with a barrage of missile and drone attacks.
The blasts — which occurred around sunrise as residents travelled to work — were preceded by the sound of Ukrainian surface-to-air defences as Kyiv’s troops tried to shoot down the drones, allegedly by Iran.
The attacks hit a building and the area near the central railway station in the Shevchenkivsky district of Kyiv, a target of last week’s strikes. Three people are confirmed to have died.
“All night and all morning, the enemy has been terrorising the civilian population. Kamikaze drones and missiles are attacking all of Ukraine. A residential building was hit in Kyiv,” Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post that included video footage of a residential building in Kyiv that had been hit.
“Fire departments are working. Several residential buildings were damaged. Medics are on the spot. We are clarifying the information about the victims,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram. In a separate message, the mayor urged residents to stay away from the city centre, adding that several streets would remain closed.
He also posted photos on Telegram of fragments from one of the drones, including a part marked with the word Geran-2 in Russian, which is Moscow’s name for the drones that Ukrainian and western officials claim it has received from Iran.
EU foreign ministers will on Monday discuss the allegations of Iranian weapons being used to attack Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine. Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, speaking before the meeting, said: “We will look for concrete evidence about the participation [of Iran in the war],” adding that Tehran had denied it “in the strongest possible terms”.
Oleksandr Kamyshin, head of Ukrainian state railways, confirmed one drone strike near the central station. Financial Times reporters witnessed thick smoke rising near critical electricity infrastructure and ash falling in the street as trains continued to depart. Police and emergency services cordoned off the area and damage could be seen to the roof of an energy company building.
Russia’s defense ministry confirmed it carried out the strikes with “high-precision long-range sea and air based weapons” to hit “Ukrainian military command and energy system targets.” The ministry claimed that “all the targets were hit.”
Kyiv residents began to emerge from shelters about an hour after the first three blasts. Andriy, who witnessed the first wave of drone attacks, said he had just stepped off an overnight train from western Ukraine when he heard a noise in the air and shooting, probably from Ukrainian air defences.
“[A drone] was there in the sky. It sounded like ‘vroom’,” he said, sipping coffee with a group of men near the scene of the attack. “And then, ‘boom’.”
As the attacks continued, passengers emerging from the train station with luggage dashed through traffic and into building entrances. As each drone approached, police screamed for people to run and Ukrainian air defence and soldiers with machine guns opened fire.
A group of people on their way to work ducked into the entrance of a residential building for cover. One distraught woman dropped to the ground and covered her head. Two others whispered prayers.
Iran-supplied Shahed drones fly low and slow before diving into their targets. Ukrainian forces have nicknamed them “mopeds” for the loud humming noise produced by their engines.
Nearly eight months into its faltering full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has in recent weeks stepped up attacks using the drones to target infrastructure across the country, sending them in swarms to make it harder for Ukrainian air defence to target them.
Russia had previously relied on its own cruise missiles and rockets for such attacks, but with supplies limited it has shifted to the less expensive Iranian drones as it fends off weeks of successful Ukrainian counteroffensives in far eastern and southern regions that it still occupies.
Ukraine’s air force wrote on Telegram that Russian forces had also hit targets in the south and east of the country at the same time as Monday’s attacks in Kyiv.
The air force reported that it shot down 15 kamikaze drones — six over Odesa region and nine over Mykolayiv region — and three cruise missiles of various types targeting critical infrastructure in the east. It did not say how many drones and missiles struck their targets.
Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, called for more military equipment from the west after the latest strikes. “We need more air defence systems and as soon as possible,” he said. “More weapons to defend the sky and destroy the enemy.”
Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Luxembourg
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