KYIV (Reuters) -Russia attacked Ukraine with nearly two hundred drones overnight, targeting mostly the Kyiv region and energy facilities in the east, authorities said on Wednesday.
Russia has stepped up drone strikes with attacks on Ukraine every night in recent weeks, and on Sunday the number of drones was a record 267 in three years of warfare.
Ukraine’s air defences shot down 110 of 177 drones launched by Russia in the overnight attack, the air force said.
It said 66 other drones were “lost”, in reference to Ukraine’s use of electronic warfare to redirect Russian drones. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kirovohrad and Sumy regions were targeted by strikes.
Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said its energy facility in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region was damaged, without providing details.
Russia focused its missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s electricity sector last year but in recent months has sharply stepped up attacks on gas storage facilities and production fields.
A drone attack on the Kyiv region killed one person, wounded at least two and set several houses on fire, said Mykola Kalashnyk, governor of the region that surrounds the Ukrainian capital.
The body of a civilian was found in a house that caught fire as a result of the attack, Kalashnyk wrote in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
The emergency service posted several photos and video on Telegram of firefighters battling flames at night in what appeared to be residential buildings and garages in the Bucha district of Kyiv region.
There was no immediate comment from Russia.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war, which began in February 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion. But thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
Throughout the night, Reuters witnesses said they heard blasts in and around Kyiv and what sounded like air defence systems in operation.
(Reporting by Oleksandr Kozhukhar, Lidia Kelly, Olena Harmach and Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Sam Holmes, Gerry Doyle and Ros Russell)
