Russia hits Kyiv with largest drone attack

Russia pummelled Kyiv with the largest drone attack of the war, injuring at least 23 people and damaging buildings across the capital only hours after US President Donald Trump spoke with Russia's Vladimir Putin, officials said yesterday.

Air raid sirens, the whine of kamikaze drones and booming detonations reverberated from early evening until dawn as Russia launched what Ukraine's Air Force said was a total of 539 drones and 11 missiles.

Residents huddled with families in underground metro stations for shelter. Acrid smoke hung over the city centre.

Trump said that the call with Putin on Thursday evening resulted in no progress at all on efforts to end the war, while the Kremlin reiterated that Moscow would keep pushing to solve the conflict's "root causes".

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who also spoke to Trump later yesterday, called the attack "deliberately massive and cynical."

During their talks, Trump and Zelensky discussed escalating Russian strikes on Ukraine and supply of air defence systems, Axios reports.

Kyiv officials said the Russian attack damaged about 40 apartment blocks, passenger railway infrastructure, five schools and kindergartens, cafes and many cars in six of Kyiv's 10 districts. Poland said the consular section of its embassy was damaged in central Kyiv, adding that staff were unharmed.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram that fourteen of the injured were hospitalised.

Ukraine's state-owned railway Ukrzaliznytsia, the country's largest carrier, said on Telegram that the attack on Kyiv forced them to divert a number of passenger trains, causing delays.

Damage was recorded on both sides of the wide Dnipro River bisecting the city and falling drone debris set a medical facility on fire in the leafy Holosiivskyi district, Klitschko said.

Ukraine's Air Force said that it destroyed 478 of the air weapons Russia launched overnight. However, air strikes were recorded in eight locations across the country with nine missiles and 63 drones, it added.

Russian air strikes on Kyiv have intensified in recent weeks and included some of the deadliest assaults of the war on the city of three million people.

A decision by Washington earlier this week to halt some shipments of critical weapons to Ukraine prompted warnings by Kyiv that the move would weaken its ability to defend against intensifying airstrikes and battlefield advances.

Yesterday, Zelensky called for increased pressure on Moscow to change its "dumb, destructive behaviour".

"For every such strike against people and human life, they must feel appropriate sanctions and other blows to their economy, their revenues, and their infrastructure," he said.