Ukraine shot down 20 attack drones and two cruise missiles overnight, the third straight Russian attack on kyiv and other parts of the country, the Ukrainian Air Force said on Thursday.
“We had a successful air defense operation,” said air force spokesman Yuriy Ignat.
“Twenty Shaheds were destroyed: all those flying were shot down. Two Kalibr cruise missiles were also destroyed,” it added.
The 20 Iranian-made Shahed drones were shot down in their “mainly in the kyiv region,” the Ukrainian Air Force said in a separate statement on Telegram.
The drones “entered the capital from different directions,” according to the kyiv military administration. He added that the air defense had destroyed “about a dozen” aircraft in the city’s airspace.
Drone debris was reported falling in five districts of kyiv, the administration added, noting that a 19-year-old woman and a 23-year-old man were hospitalized with shrapnel injuries.
Two people were injured in the Darnitski district “as a result of falling debris,” Sergiy Popko, head of the city’s military administration, wrote on Telegram.
It was not clear if they were the same two people.
Meanwhile, emergency services answered calls in other districts after several “explosions in the capital,” kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
He noted on Telegram that firefighters found the body of a deceased in the Podilsky district, although the cause of death was unclear.
Fires broke out in an apartment building in Shevchenkivsky and in a non-residential building in Podilsky, the mayor added.
The Ukrainian Air Force also reported the launch of an Iskander-M ballistic missile from Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Moscow, although the information is being investigated.