Russia launches first drone strike on Kyiv in 12 days, all shot down

FILE - Ukrainian air defense intercepts a Shahed drone mid-air in the third Russia aerial attack on the capital in the last 24 hours in Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 30, 2023. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine’s military was largely reliant on Soviet-era weaponry. While that arsenal helped Ukraine fend off an assault on the capital of Kyiv and prevent a total rout in the early weeks of the war, billions of dollars in military assistance has , since poured into the country, including more modern Western-made weapons. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

Drone strike: After a relative lull, Russia launched a drone attack early Sunday on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, officials said. It was the first such attack of the war in 12 days.

All of the Iranian-made Shahed exploding drones were detected and shot down, according to Serhii Popko, the head of the Kyiv city administration. In addition to the city itself, the surrounding Kyiv region was targeted. Kyiv regional Gov. Ruslan Kravchenko reported that one person was wounded by falling debris from a destroyed drone.

Officials in the Ukrainian capital didn’t provide an exact number of drones that attacked the city. But Ukraine’s air force said that across the country, eight Shaheds and three Kalibr cruise missiles were launched by the Russians.

Further south, a 13-year-old boy was wounded in overnight shelling of Ukraine’s partially occupied southern Kherson province, said Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, spokesman for the Ukrainian administration of the province.

Drone strike: The child was wounded when the Russian army shelled the village of Mylove on the banks of the Dnieper River in the Beryslav district, Tolokonnikov said. “The child was hospitalized, there is no threat to his life,” Tolokonnikov added,” he said on state TV. Shelling of Kherson province continued Sunday morning, wounding four people in the regional capital, also called Kherson. The regional prosecutor’s office said that a residential area of the city was targeted by Russian troops operating in the Russia-occupied part of the Kherson province. “ “At least four citizens were wounded, two of them due to a targeted strike on a high-rise building,” the office wrote on Telegram.