Russia launches ‘air attack’, alert issued in Kyiv

Russia pounded the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv with drone attacks for the second continuous night, which le to alert in the city as per Al Jazeera’s reports.

The attacks came on Monday’s early morning after a New Year assault by Russia that saw Kyiv and other cities under fire from missiles and Iranian-made drones. The drone attacks destroyed critical infrastructure in Kyiv and the nearby regions, according to the Ukrainian officials.

“It is loud in the region and in the capital: night drone attacks,” said Oleksiy Kuleba, the governor of the Kyiv region.
“Russians launched several waves of (Iranian-made) Shahed drones. Targeting critical infrastructure facilities,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging application.
“Our air defence forces are working on the targets,” he added. “The main thing now is to stay calm and stay in shelters until the alarm is off.”

After a volley of Russian missile and drone strikes on Kyiv and other locations on New Year’s Eve and early on New Year’s Day, the attacks took place. According to Al Jazeera, at least three people were killed in attacks on Saturday in Kyiv and other towns, and a fourth person was killed in an incident in the southern region of Zaporizhia.

A building in the city’s northeastern Desniansky neighbourhood was damaged by debris from a wrecked drone on Monday, according to Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, who confirmed that at least one person was hurt in the attack. He claimed that the victim was a 19-year-old male on Telegram.

According to the military administration of the city of Kiev, 16 air objects were destroyed over Kyiv by Ukraine’s air defence systems at 3 am local time on Monday (01:00 GMT). According to Al Jazeera, air raid sirens had been sounding for more than three hours at that point.

By the early hours of Monday, according to Ukraine’s regional military command in the east, air defence systems had shot down nine Iranian-made Shahed drones over the areas of Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia.

Meanwhile, in a video address on Sunday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised his citizens’ “sense of unity, of authenticity, of life itself”. Russia, he said, “will not take away a single year from Ukraine. They will not take away our independence. We will not give them anything.”
“Drones, missiles, everything else will not help them,” he said of the Russians. “Because we stand united. They are united only by fear.”