Russia’s night attack on Kyiv leaves eight injured, including child, Ukraine says

KYIV: A Russian overnight air attack on Kyiv wounded eight residents of an apartment building, including a three-year-old child, authorities in the Ukrainian capital said on Monday.

Four of those injured in the attack, which took place soon after midnight on Monday, have been hospitalised, with one person in serious condition, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, said on the Telegram messaging app.

Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that all of the people were residents of a multi-storey apartment building in the city’s Darnytskyi district on the left bank of the Dnipro River.

“The blast wave damaged windows from the 6th to the 11th floor,” Klitschko said in a post on Telegram.

The capital and most of Ukraine were under air raid alerts for several hours overnight following Ukrainian Air Force warnings of Russian missile and drone attacks.

With the threat of missile strikes on western parts of Ukraine that border Poland - a NATO member - Polish armed forces scrambled aircraft to ensure the safety of Polish airspace.

The central Ukrainian city of Kropyvnytskyi came under an attack, regional Governor Andriy Raikovych said, adding that emergency services were working on the site and information about potential damage will be released later on Monday.

The full scale of the Russian attack on Ukraine was not immediately known. Reuters’ witnesses heard loud blasts shaking the city of Kyiv overnight in what sounded like air defence units in operation.

There was no comment from Russia on the attack.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in their strikes in the war that Russia started in February 2022.

But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.