AP
Kyiv
A Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s southern port city of Odesa killed two women and a toddler, authorities said on Monday, while Ukrainian long-range drones targeted Russia’s key Black Sea port for oil exports. The nighttime attack on Odesa heavily damaged an apartment block, killing the women and a 2-year-old child, officials said. Rescuers working under floodlights pulled four people from the rubble.
Eleven people were hospitalised, including a pregnant woman and two children – the youngest less than a year old, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X.
Russia has pounded civilian areas of Ukraine since it invaded its neighbour just over four years ago, killing more than 15,000 people, according to the United Nations. Over the past week, Russia has launched at Ukraine more than 2,800 attack drones, nearly 1,350 powerful glide bombs and more than 40 missiles of various types, according to Zelenskyy.
In the southern city of Kherson, Russian shelling killed an elderly woman and three other women, 86, 79 and 44, were hospitalised, according to Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the regional military administration. The injured women sustained shrapnel wounds, concussion, blast injuries and head trauma, he said.
Russia has also taken aim at Ukraine’s power grid, and overnight barrages hit energy infrastructure in Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Dnipro regions, Zelenskyy said.
More than 300,000 households were without electricity in northern Chernihiv after distribution facilities were damaged in the attacks, according to the regional power utility.
Zelenskyy expressed concern in a weekend interview with The Associated Press that the war in the Middle East is draining stockpiles of weapons that Ukraine needs to defend itself, especially American-made Patriot air defence systems that can stop missiles.
Zelenskyy said Monday that the country’s partners “need to strengthen air defence together so that the interception rate of drones and missiles continues to increase.”
With US-led peace efforts stalled, Zelenskyy added: “Russia has no intention of stopping” its invasion.
Ukraine has fought back by developing its own long-range drones, which now reach targets some 1,500 kilometres (900 miles) inside Russia.
Ukraine has used them recently to hammer Russian oil facilities as Moscow looks to boost its exports after the Trump administration gave it a temporary waiver from sanctions to ease supply constraints. Kyiv officials complain that Russia will use the additional revenue on new weapons to hit Ukraine harder.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said that air defences downed 50 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Krasnodar Gov Veniamin Kondratyev said that eight people, including two children, were injured in a series of Ukrainian drone attacks on Novorossiysk, one of Russia’s largest Black Sea ports. The attack damaged six apartment buildings and two private houses, he said.
Unconfirmed media reports said the drones targeted the Sheskharis oil terminal at the Black Sea port.
Last week, Ukraine’s drones struck oil facilities in the Gulf of Finland, in northwest Russia.
