Drone attack on Kyiv after air alerts issued across eastern Ukraine

Air raid alerts have been issued in Kyiv and across eastern Ukraine, with reports of Russian drone attacks on the capital.

The air alerts began at midnight Monday morning in the country’s capital, and most of eastern Ukraine, and were still wailing two hours later.

Debris from a destroyed drone hit Kyiv’s northeastern Desnianskiy district, wounding one, the city’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. The district, located on the left bank of the Dnieper River, is chiefly a residential area and the capital’s most populous district.

Ukraine’s regional military command in the country’s east said air defence systems destroyed nine Iranian-made Shahed drones over the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions by early hours of Monday.

It was the second night in a row of strikes, after Kyiv was targeted on New Year’s Eve. The damage to the capital was limited to two cases of rocket debris falling on the city, damaging a car in the city centre on Sunday.

Three others were reported dead around the country, after attacks on Kherson, where a children’s hospital was also hit, in Khmelnytsky in the west of the country and in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.

Sunday’s attacks came minutes after Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy delivered his new year address, saying he hoped 2023 would bring a successful conclusion to the fighting, and peace to the country.

“We don’t know for sure what 2023 will bring us. I want to wish all of us one thing – victory. And that’s the main thing.”

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report