Reuters
Firefighters work at a site of an apartment building hit by a Russian drone strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine. [Photo Credit: Reuters]
Russia attacked two Kyiv petrol stations with jet-powered drones early on Friday, killing two people in an escalation of strikes that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said were becoming “increasingly terrorist in nature.”
Two more people were killed in Russian strikes in southeastern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region and in Kharkiv in the northeast, according to the regions’ governors.
Ukraine also carried out drone attacks on Russia, killing two people in the Tula region overnight and one on Friday in the Kursk region, local officials said.
With fighting on the front line largely stalled more than 4-1/2 years into the war in Ukraine, Moscow and Kyiv have increasingly struck logistics and other economic targets in recent weeks to try to damage the other’s war effort.
Russia has for two weeks been carrying out almost constant attacks with faster jet-powered drones that have killed a number of Kyiv residents and disrupted daily life in the capital. The attacks were paused while U.S. peace negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Kyiv at the weekend, but then resumed.
The two dead in Kyiv were at one of the two petrol stations that was attacked, officials said, one by a double-tap strike.
Friday’s strikes followed what appeared to be the first attack on a Kyiv petrol station a day earlier. In recent months, Russia hit some 300 petrol stations, mainly in or near Ukraine’s frontline regions.
A further 12 people, including a 12-year-old boy, were injured in Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. An attack on a Kyiv residential block injured eight people overnight.
