KYIV (Reuters) -A sustained overnight Russian drone attack killed a woman in the capital region and injured at least three people, including a child, Ukrainian authorities said early on Sunday, as Moscow stepped up its attacks following peace talks on Friday.
“Unfortunately, as a result of the enemy attack in the Obukhiv district, a woman died from her injuries,” Mykola Kalashnik, governor of the Kyiv region, posted on the Telegram messaging app.
As of 0300 GMT, Kyiv, the region around it and most of eastern half of Ukraine had been under air raid alerts for six hours. Air defence units were engaged several times trying to repel attacks, the military said on Telegram.
The first direct talks in three years between Russia and Ukraine on Friday failed to broker the ceasefire Kyiv and its allies have been urging in the more than three-year-old war. The talks in Istanbul yielded an agreement to trade 1,000 prisoners of war on each side.
“It’s been a tough night. The Russians have always used war and attacks to intimidate everyone in negotiations,” Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, said on Telegram about Sunday’s attack.
On Saturday a Russian drone attack killed nine civilians after hitting a shuttle bus in the Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine, Kyiv said. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called the attack “deliberate” and urged stronger sanctions on Moscow, which said it had attacked a military facility.
U.S. President Donald Trump said he would speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskiy on Monday.
The scale of Sunday’s attack was not immediately clear. According to several war-monitoring Telegram channels, there were more than 80 drones in the Ukrainian skies coming from Russia at some point.
All the injured in the Obukhiv district just south of Kyiv city were hospitalised, including the four-year-old child, Kalashnik said. Several residential buildings were damaged in the area, he said.
Reuters witnesses in and around Kyiv heard blasts that sounded like air defence units in operation. There was no immediate comment from Russia.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war, but thousands have been killed in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Valentyn Ogirenko, Gleb Garanich and Serhiy Karazy in Kyiva and Lidia Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by William Mallard)
