LIFE IN KYIV

MONDAY morning rush hour in Kyiv has gone from hectic commuting through a congested city centre to the creeping fear that you may not make it out of your home alive.

In a repeat of the recent massive missile assault across Ukraine by Russia’s increasingly frustrated military machine, Kyiv and other cities started the working week to a swarm of kamikaze drones swooping down on them from the sky.

Anatoly, a 50-something man who has lived in the area since childhood, said he heard two explosions near his home within 10 minutes of each other.

“I jumped out of bed after the first and saw the second one coming down fast,” he said, nervously searching his shirt pocket for a cigarette on the street below.

Bright red fire trucks and ambulances crowded around an apartment block billowing large clouds of white smoke.

Across the street stands a huge heating plant, the likely target of the attack, its smoke stacks jutting out defiantly near a glass skyscraper still in tatters from last Monday’s missile attack on the same area.

For Anatoly, whose elderly parents have moved to a safer area, the neighbourhood might be getting too dangerous.

“Of course, these drones are nothing compared to missiles – but all the same,” he exclaims.

Some 43 Iranian kamikaze drones have been launched at Ukraine in at least two separate waves from the south, the Ukrainian

Air Force said, noting that its air defence systems had shot down 37.

“But don’t be staring out of your windows, because in dense population centres shells have a way of coming back to hit you in the head,” an Air Force spokesman warned the public on the same day.

Some Ukrainian civilians, however, have begun to take the defence of their city into their own hands, with a viral video on social media showing one man shooting at a drone with a shotgun from his balcony.

The police, while warning civilians against such tactics, have however also reported shooting them down.

The latest attack has also spurred increasingly desperate calls from Kyiv for the West to provide it with more air defence systems.

Overnight, areas in Ukraine’s interior were also hit in the drone attack, with power stations again coming under fire, as Ukraine tries to ready itself for winter.

Other areas of the country were savagely shelled from Russian border regions.

Kyiv alone took four hits, leaving at least four people dead and three more hospitalised. Alexander, an emergency services worker, emerges from the smoke-filled strike site to report at least four people still buried beneath the rubble of the apartment block across from the heating plant.

Its ground floors were almost instantly engulfed in flames as residents desperately tried to evacuate.

“We still don’t exactly know how many people are still trapped in there,” he declares mournfully.

‘We don’t know exactly how many people are still trapped’