By Gleb Garanich and Valentyn Ogirenko
KYIV (Reuters) -Nine people were injured, several apartments set ablaze and a kindergarten was damaged in Russia’s 19th attack on the Ukrainian capital this month, officials in Kyiv said on Wednesday.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 62 drones overnight, but air defence units destroyed 33 of them over Kyiv and other regions, although 25 were unaccounted for.
“Nineteen air attacks on Kyiv in October!” Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on the Telegram messaging app. “Overnight, Russian drones again flew over the capital.”
Falling debris from a destroyed drone sparked a fire in a multi-storey apartment building in Kyiv’s western district of Solomianskyi and injured at least nine people, including an 11-year-old girl, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram.
“All of them were treated by medics on the spot,” Klitschko said.
Nineteen people were evacuated from the building, said the city’s military administration, which also posted photographs of a building with blown-out windows and damaged facade that it described as a kindergarten in Solomianskyi.
Reuters witnesses at the scene saw firefighters scrambling to douse flames at flats in an apartment building with several windows blown out.
Air raid alerts sounded across Kyiv, the surrounding region and nearly the whole eastern half of Ukraine for more than two hours overnight.
(Writing by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Clarence Fernandez)
