A Ukrainian drone strike killed one person and injured three others in the Russian city of Voronezh, local officials said on Sunday. Meanwhile, thousands of residents in Kiev remain without power after heavy Russian bombing.
Voronezh region governor Alexander Gusev said on Telegram that a young woman died overnight in a hospital intensive care unit during Saturday’s attack, in which fragments of a drone fell on a house.
Three other people were injured and more than a dozen apartment buildings, private homes and a high school were damaged, he said, adding that air defense systems shot down 17 drones over Voronezh. The city has a population of just over 1 million and is approximately 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
Ukraine’s General Staff said on Sunday its forces attacked three drilling platforms operated by Russian oil giant Lukoil in Caspian Sea waters. Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes on Russian energy bases are aimed at depriving Moscow of the oil export revenue it needs for a full-scale invasion.
Russia bombarded Ukraine with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles on Friday night, killing at least four people in the capital Kiev, Ukrainian officials said. For the second time in nearly four years of war, Russia has attacked western Ukraine with a powerful new hypersonic missile, sending a clear warning to Kiev and Nato.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy supplier, said on Sunday that 30,000 people in Kyiv were still without power after the attack. About half of the apartment buildings in snowy Kiev – nearly 6,000 – were without heating amid daytime temperatures of about -8 degrees Celsius (17.6 degrees Fahrenheit), Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said on Friday.
The launch of nuclear-capable Oreshnik missiles comes after reports of significant progress in talks between Ukraine and its allies on how to defend the country from further aggression by Moscow in the wake of a U.S.-led peace deal.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a night speech on Saturday that Ukrainian negotiators “continue to communicate with the United States.”
He said chief negotiator Rustem Umerov was in contact with U.S. partners on Saturday.
Separately, Ukraine’s General Staff said that as of Sunday, Russia had launched 154 drones into Ukraine, of which 125 were shot down.
Russia deployed its new jet-powered “Geran-5” unmanned attack drones against Ukraine for the first time this month, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Service said on Sunday. The Geran is the Russian variant of the Iranian-designed Shahed.
The drone can carry a 90-kilogram (200-pound) warhead and has a range of nearly 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), according to the agency.
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