Russia launches 948 drones at Ukraine in largest attack over 24-hour period
Russia launched the largest air attack on Ukraine in a 24-hour period since the start of the war, hitting cities across the country with 948 drones.
More than 400 drones were fired on Tuesday afternoon alone, in an unusual daytime attack that killed and injured scores of people in western Ukraine.
These strikes took place a few hours after a violent nighttime attack left at least five people dead.
In Lviv, Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said 22 people had been injured in his city and warned the number would rise.
Lviv officials released images of a burning residential building next to the Bernardine Monastery [Andriy Sadovyi/Telegram]
The region’s leader, Maksym Kozytskyi, said the Bernardine Monastery, a 16th-century UNESCO site, had been damaged. A video released by Lviv authorities shows a fire burning the roof of a residential building near the monastery.
Three other western cities, Ivano-Frankivsk, Vinnytsia and Ternopil, were also targeted.
The head of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, Svitlana Onyshchouk, said two people were killed. Four people, including a six-year-old child, were injured. Several buildings in the city as well as the maternity hospital were damaged.
And in Vinnytsia, one person died and 11 were injured on Tuesday afternoon.
While four years of war have left virtually no part of Ukraine untouched, the west of the country has been relatively less intensely and frequently hit than other regions closer to the Russian border to the east.
Yurii Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, said Tuesday evening that a “large number of drones” had entered Ukrainian airspace from the north of the country, “effectively moving in columns.”
“The geography of the daytime strikes was wider than that of the night… It can be said that this is one of the largest attacks in a 24-hour period,” he said.
Four years after Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war continues unabated, with Russia launching near-daily attacks on Ukrainian cities.
On Tuesday, the governor of Russia’s Kursk region said one man was killed and 13 people injured in a Ukrainian drone attack on an agricultural business.
