Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, with at least 10 drones overnight, damaging a multistory administrative tower and other buildings, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday, as Moscow kept up the pressure on metropolitan centers far from the front lines.
The officials said that Ukraine’s air defenses had shot down all the drones aimed at Kyiv but that falling debris from the interceptions had caused damage. The State Emergency Service said that an administrative building had been hit, and the head of the Kyiv regional administration, Ruslan Kravchenko, said that a house, a garage and a car had caught fire.
“Another mass attack of the enemy involving attack U.A.V.s,” said a statement by the regional administration on the Telegram app, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles. “Groups of drones were flying toward Kyiv simultaneously from multiple directions,” it added.
Russian drones also targeted the Black Sea port of Odesa and the surrounding region, including the Danube River port of Izmail, damaging infrastructure Ukraine uses to ship grain.
Ukrainian air defenses have for the most part thwarted a Russian campaign in recent weeks to attack the capital using drones and missiles. Even so, loud explosions caused by air defense systems, some supplied by the United States and Ukraine’s other allies, have at times rattled residents and forced some to sleep in shelters.
Also on Wednesday, the authorities in the northeastern region of Kharkiv said that a 91-year-old woman was killed and a man was seriously wounded in Russian shelling a day earlier in the village of Pershotravneve.