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Russia launches biggest drone attack on Kyiv yet
Five people were wounded, nearly 200 buildings were left with no power by the attack
Ukraine's capital suffered what officials said was Russia's largest drone attack of the war on Saturday, leaving five people wounded as the rumble of air defences and explosions woke residents at sunrise.
The attack began hitting different districts of Kyiv in the early hours of Saturday, with more waves coming as the sun came up. The air raid warning lasted six hours.
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Air force chief Mykola Oleschuk said 71 of the 75 drones launched at Ukraine had been downed.
He praised the effectiveness of 'mobile fire' units - usually fast pickup trucks with a machine gun or flak cannon mounted on their flatbed. According to Oleschuk, these downed nearly 40% of the drones.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko stated the attack had wounded five people, including an 11-year-old girl, and damaged buildings in districts all across the city. Fragments from a downed drone had started a fire in a children's nursery, he said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out that the attack had come in the early hours of the day when Ukrainians commemorate the national tragedy of the 1932-33 Holodomor famine in which several million people starved to death.
"Russia launched around 70 "Shahed" drones at Ukraine precisely on the eve of the Holodomor genocide commemoration day," he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
The target of Saturday's attack was not immediately clear, but Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Russia will once again wage an aerial campaign to destroy Ukraine's energy system, as it sought to do last winter.
Ukraine's Energy Ministry said nearly 200 buildings in the capital, including 77 residential ones, had been left without power as a result of the attack.
"It looks like tonight we heard the overture. The prelude to the winter season," Serhiy Fursa, a prominent Ukrainian economist, wrote on Facebook.
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