Russia hits drone demonstration near Kyiv, killing 10
Ukraine says 10 were killed and around 100 injured in the strike, a day after Zelenskyy met with officials from US arms giant Raytheon. Meanwhile
Ukraine says 10 were killed and around 100 injured in the strike, a day after Zelenskyy met with officials from US arms giant Raytheon. Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, another Wildberries warehouse came under drone fire. Russia struck various sites in Ukraine on Friday, including a defense event on the outskirts of Kyiv thought to be showcasing aerial defense technologies like drones. Sometimes fatal attacks elsewhere in the country disrupted power supplies in five separate regions. Meanwhile, Ukraine again struck facilities belonging to Russia's largest online retailer, Wildberries, this time in President Vladimir Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg. And in the skies over Romania, NATO jets downed a stray drone on Friday morning, with no immediate reports of casualties or damage. Across the Atlantic, the White House said President Donald Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would hold talks on Tuesday of next week, almost four and a half years after Russia's full scale invasion. The strikes came soon after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held talks with representatives of US weapons manufacturer Raytheon, which makes the mobile Patriot missile interceptor SAMs Image: State Emergency Service of Ukraine What happened in Ukraine? Acting regional military administration head Ruslan Oliinyk said the strike hit the grounds of a privately operated military training site that was hosting an event at the time.
The site is some 20-30 kilometers (12-18 miles) from central Kyiv, in the Bucha district. Attorney General Ruslan Kravchenko called the attack a war crime, saying that 10 people were killed and around 100 more were injured. The surrounding area was also struck repeatedly, with Zelenskyy posting images of destruction and rescue efforts from the wider Kyiv region. He said, "Interceptors for Patriot systems are the number one priority," a reference to the air defense systems made by US arms giant Raytheon, which had sent a delegation to Kyiv on Thursday. Russia's Defense Ministry also acknowledged the attack online, saying it had used "high-precision long-range weapons" to target "a demonstration of unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs or drones], including promising ones, of Ukrainian and foreign production, used to strike civilian targets in Russia." Russia's Defense Ministry claimed that at the time of the strike, leading defense industry officials and Ukrainian military members were at the site, saying these people were "directly planning and carrying out strikes on Russian territory." Five people were reported killed in the eastern region of Slovyansk on Friday. The EU's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, bemoaned one such strike that she said hit "Latvia's Honorary Consulate" in Slovyansk, saying, "We will summon Russia's envoy to the EU over today's strikes," and thatshe would propose further EU sanctions to target Russia's "military-industrial complex." Ukraine's energy company Ukrenergo reported damage to power plants in five separate regions, saying around 150,000 people were left without power in the Chernihiv region alone after an attack on a facility there.
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