KYIV, May 24 (Reuters) – Russia struck Ukraine’s capital Kyiv on Sunday with a massive wave of missiles and drones that damaged residential buildings, offices and schools, killing at least one person and injuring 21, officials said.
Explosions reverberated through the city just after 1 a.m. (2200 GMT Saturday), following a warning by Ukraine’s air force on its Telegram channel that Russia might launch a hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missile.
The air force did not respond to a request for comment on whether an Oreshnik struck any target during the attack.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram that one person was believed to have been killed after a nine-story residential building in the capital’s central district of Shevchenko was hit. Emergency services were at the site extinguishing a blaze, the mayor said.
Klitschko said 21 people were injured, with 13 of those hospitalized, three of them in serious condition. Air raid sirens sounded again after sunrise on Sunday in Kyiv.
Many residents sought shelter overnight in the city’s metro stations. Nataliia Zvarych, 62, said she had rushed to her local station as explosions started rocking the city.
“It was terrifying, scary,” she said. “We have been sitting here for more than three hours now, listening to the explosions up there.”
In Shevchenko, several people were trapped inside an air raid shelter at a school after a strike blocked its entrance with debris, Klitschko said.
More people were believed to be stuck inside a shelter at a business centre in the same neighbourhood, the head of the city’s military administration said. He said more than 40 locations in the city had been damaged.
Strikes were reported in other parts of Ukraine. Three more people were injured in the broader Kyiv region, according to the governor, Mykola Kalashnyk.
SUNRISE REVEALS DAMAGE
As the sun rose, black smoke from several fires drifted across the city’s skyline, Reuters images showed. Fire workers used hoses to douse the flames in damaged buildings, and rescue workers evacuated the wounded.
The front facade of one five-storey residential building in Shevchenko had collapsed, images showed. Officials reported damage to offices, shops, and the foyer of a metro station.
In the city’s historic Independence Square, a post office was damaged by an explosion.
On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned Russia was preparing a strike against Ukraine using the Oreshnik missile, citing intelligence from Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe.
Russia has already attacked Ukraine twice with the Oreshnik, a missile Russian President Vladimir Putin has boasted is impossible to intercept because of its reported velocity of more than 10 times the speed of sound.
Zelenskiy’s warning came after Putin ordered his military to prepare options for retaliation against Ukraine for a drone strike on a student dorm in the Russian-occupied Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine on Friday.
Ukraine’s military denied the accusations and said it had targeted a Russian drone command unit.
Neighbouring Poland activated its military aviation amid the large-scale strikes on Sunday but no violations of its airspace were detected, the Polish army said.
(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa and Daniel Flynn in Kyiv; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Kim Coghill)
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