By Anna Voitenko and Manuel Ausloos
KYIV (Reuters) – A large-scale Russian drone attack on Kyiv killed at least three people, including a 5-year-old child, causing fires in high-rise apartment buildings and damage throughout the capital, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko, in a post on the Telegram messaging app, called it “a massive enemy drone attack on Kyiv” and said emergency services had been dispatched to several districts of the city to respond to reports of fires and damage.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched 147 drones overnight targeting several parts of the country. The military said air defence units had destroyed 97 of the drones, with 25 failing to reach their targets.
The drone strikes come hours ahead of planned talks in Saudi Arabia, as diplomatic efforts to end the three-year-old war intensify. Experts and officials from Ukraine, the U.S. and Russia are due to discuss ways to ensure the safety of shipping in the Black Sea.
The United States is pushing for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, and hopes to reach a broad ceasefire in the war by April 20, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the planning.
But despite the peace push, both sides have been reporting continued strikes.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russian forces had used more than 1,580 guided aerial bombs, nearly 1,100 attack drones and 15 missiles against Ukraine over the past week.
“We need new solutions, new pressure on Moscow to stop such strikes and this war,” Zelenskiy said on Telegram.
AIR RAID ALERTS
Ukraine’s state emergency service said the bodies of the child and a man had been found as rubble was clearer in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district.
A woman died after drone debris caused a fire in a high-rise residential building in Dniprovskyi district, the service said.
Another eight people were injured in the city as a result of the overnight drone strikes, according to the Interior Ministry.
Photos published later by the emergency service showed a burnt-out apartment in a multi-storey building, the ceiling of one of the rooms was punctured, with the charred remains of furniture left scattered about.
Two people were also injured and several houses were damaged in the region surrounding the capital, regional Governor Mykola Kalashnik said on Telegram.
There was no immediate comment from Russia. Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia started with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Kyiv, its surrounding region and the eastern half of Ukraine were under air raid alerts for more than five hours starting late on Saturday, according to Ukraine air force maps.
(Reporting by Oleksandr Kozhukhar, Pavel Polityuk, Lidia Kelly; Writing by Lidia Kelly and Pavel Polityuk; Editing by William Mallard, Jamie Freed and Helen Popper)
