Russian missiles shatter 3 weeks of calm in Kyiv
RUSSIAN missiles hit Kyiv yesterday in the first attack on the Ukrainian capital in three weeks.
At least 14 projectiles were launched into a residential area, hitting two blocks and the grounds of a kindergarten, killing at least one and injuring six.
Pictures showed a seven-yearold girl being pulled out of the rubble and taken away on a stretcher.
The girl’s mother, a Russian citizen called Katerina, was also stretchered out, but there were unconfirmed reports the fatality was the child’s father.
The attack was the heaviest assault on Kyiv, where life has been returning to relative norone mality, for months. The city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko suggested the strike might have been a ‘symbolic attack’ to intimidate Ukrainians ahead of the start of the G7 summit and this week’s Nato gathering in Madrid.
Ukraine said the missiles were launched from Tupolev bombers over the Caspian Sea 900 miles away. The area that was hit, the historic Shevchenkivskiy district, is home to a number of universities, restaurants and art galleries.
Russia denied that it targets civilians, but its defence ministry said it had used high-precision weapons to strike Ukrainian army training centres in the regions of Chernihiv, Zhytomyr and Lviv on Saturday. Other missiles yesterday struck the central city of Cherkasy, where person died, and the northeastern Kharkiv region.
US President Joe Biden, at the G7 summit in Germany, denounced the Russian attacks as ‘more of their barbarism’.
The attacks came as Russian state TV showed footage of a third British captive who ‘faces the death penalty’.
Until now, Vladimir Putin’s media has concentrated on Britons Aiden Aslin, 28, and Shaun Pinner, 48, both sentenced to death.
But yesterday, two months after he was detained, footage was shown of the moment father-of-four Andrew Hill, 35, from Plymouth, was held by Russian troops in April.
A video was also shown of the shattered and tearful captive speaking to his grandmother in Britain, saying: ‘I am being detained here as a suspected mercenary. The penalty for that here is death.’
In another video, in hospital, the ex-Army soldier appears to break down as he says: ‘I want to go home, to my homeland, to my family, to my children.’
It is unclear if any verdict has been passed as yet on Mr Hill.
‘More of their barbarism’