Russia and Ukraine trade deadly strikes
Officials from both sides say Russia and Ukraine launched deadly attacks, killing 10 people and wounding dozens more.
The attacks took place while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was traveling to Istanbul to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
He will also meet with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians.
In his post on the Telegram messaging application after arriving in Istanbul, Zelenskiy said, “We are working to strengthen our partnership to ensure the real protection of lives, advance stability and guarantee security in Europe and the Middle East. Joint efforts always yield the best results.” he said.
In a statement made online, the Ukrainian Air Force said that Russia fired 286 UAVs at Ukraine throughout the night, and 260 of them were shot down.
Oleksandr Hanzha, head of the regional military administration, said five people, three women and two men, were killed and 19 others were injured in the city of Nikopol in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Market stalls and a shop were damaged in the attack.
The National Police said 11 people were injured in the attack in the city of Sumy, near the Russian border. Residential areas were hit in the attack, houses, cars and public service networks were damaged.
Ukrainian State Emergency Service said that a drone attack caused a fire on the first floor of a three-storey office and warehouse building in the capital Kiev. There was no loss of life.
In the partially occupied Donetsk region, a Russian drone strike hit a civilian vehicle on the Kostyantynivka-Druzhkivka road on Saturday morning, killing one woman and wounding another, according to Serhiy Horbunov, head of the Kostyantynivka City Military Administration.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed in a statement on Saturday that its forces had fired “long-range air- and ground-based precision weapons, as well as attack drones” at “military-industrial and energy facilities used by the Armed Forces of Ukraine”.
Meanwhile, Leonid Pasechnik, the Russian-appointed head of the occupied Luhansk region, said Ukrainian forces hit railway infrastructure and private houses in the area, killing a family of three – a couple and their eight-year-old child.
The Security Service of Ukraine, also known as the SBU, claimed to have used drone strikes to halt production at a metallurgical plant in the Russian-occupied city of Alchevsk in the Luhansk region, most of which is controlled by Russian forces.
The SBU said on its Facebook page that the drone hit blast furnaces, important production workshops, distillation columns, gas pipelines and electrical substations that provide power to the facility that supplies Russia’s state tank and wagon factory Uralvagonzavod.
There has been no statement from Russian officials yet.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that the Russian army shot down 85 Ukrainian drones overnight over nine Russian regions, the annexed Crimea region and the Black Sea.
One person was killed and four others were injured in Russia’s Rostov region on the border with Ukraine, regional governor Yuri Slyusar said.
Slyusar said the attack sparked a fire at the warehouse facility of an unnamed logistics company and sparked another fire on a foreign-flagged dry cargo ship a few kilometers off the coast.
Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said that one person was injured in the city of Tolyatti in the Samara region.
He said the roof of a residential building was damaged and the windows of many apartments were broken.
