Kyiv targeted with 'calculated and wicked' overnight air attack killing six

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Russia’s latest attack against Ukraine as “deliberate, calculated and wicked”, after six people were killed and dozens injured in a wave of nighttime strikes across the capital Kyiv.

- Luke Harding

Shortly after midnight air raid sirens sounded and residents made their way to shelters or lay between two walls in their apartments. Soon afterwards the whine of Shahed drones could be heard in the sky, together with heavy machine gun fire from Ukrainian air defences.

Ukraine’s president said the country was hit by 430 drones and 18 missiles. The dead were at home in an apartment block on Kyiv’s left bank when it was hit. Dozens of other buildings were damaged, including the Azerbaijan embassy which was struck by falling debris.

“It was scary. Our windows shook. I thought: ‘Oh God, this is the end,’” Bruce Avalord, a longtime American resident, said, speaking outside a wrecked multi-storey residential compound. A drone careened into its upper levels at 3am, witnesses said, exploding in a bright orange fireball.

Yesterday a bulldozer scooped up glass and bricks which had fallen on the pavement in the Sviatoshynskyi district. Owners checked damaged cars. “There are no military targets here, just civilians,” Avalord said

“The Russians want people to beg the government to capitulate. The tactic won’t work. Ukrainians are resilient.”

Another local, Valentina, said she threw on her clothes and hid in her ninth-floor corridor next to the lift, staying there until dawn.