Kyiv targeted again in bomb campaign

RUSSIA renewed its bombing campaign in Ukraine yesterday with strikes on cities across the country.

At least one person died when a tank factory in Kyiv was hit, according to the city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko. Smoke billowed into the sky in the Darnyrsky district in the south-east of the capital after what Moscow described as ‘high-precision long-range’ strikes on the armaments plant.

Russia, which has been stung by the ease with which Ukraine’s military hardware has picked off its tanks and even sunk its Black Sea flagship, also claimed to have destroyed part of an armoured vehicle plant in Kyiv.

Separately, two civilians were killed and 18 injured when a cruise missile struck the north-eastern city of Kharkiv. The local prosecutor’s office said the attacks had damaged residential buildings, a market and shops.

Ukraine said air defence systems around Lviv, a major city in the west, had shot down four cruise missiles but that two civilians had been killed in Russian attacks in the eastern region of Luhansk, which is set to be the focus of Vladimir Putin’s fresh offensive.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian troops had died in the war, with 10,000 injured.

The United Nations said it had confirmed the deaths of 1,982 Ukrainian civilians, but that figure does not include those killed in blockaded cities such as Mariupol.