Dawn attacks on city’s flat blocks
RUSSIAN TERROR: KYIV WAKES UP TO EXPLOSIONS
Adistraught man crouches over a woman’s body draped in a bloodstained cloth, the latest victim of a new Russian tactic that is making Kyiv wake up to daily terror.
At daybreak for each of the last four days, the Ukrainian capital has been hit by isolated strikes on apartment blocks, killing at least seven people.
Kyiv has been bracing for a fullon Russian assault, but Moscow’s forces have stalled as they try to encircle the city with a pre-war population of 3.5 million people.
Instead, the Russian invaders have launched a sudden but limited escalation in attacks, always at around the same time, in what Ukrainian authorities say is an attempt to break Kyiv’s will.
In the most recent attack, debris from a downed missile blew a huge chunk out of the top of a 16-storey apartment block at 5.04am, emergency services said.
“At five in the morning I heard a whistle, then my husband screamed, calling me,” Iryna Voinovska, a 55-year-old woman who lives on the bottom floor, said sobbing. “The main thing is that we are alive... Unfortunately, one woman died on the 16th floor, she was crushed by a concrete slab.”
Every day since Monday it has been the same in Kyiv: explosions across the city as the sun rises and emergency services rushing out.
The targets have almost all been the same too, Soviet-era apartment blocks left badly damaged .
On Monday, a shell hit a building in the capital’s Obolon district at 5.09am, killing at least two people. An attack later that morning killed one person.
On Tuesday at 5am, two residential buildings were hit. Four people died as flames swept through one block.
Dawn on Wednesday brought another strike at 6.16am.