2023-11-25 11:08:45
Ukraine said it shot down 71 Russian drones overnight from Friday to Saturday, denouncing the largest drone attack on kyiv since the start of the war.
Ukraine on Saturday accused Russia of having carried out its largest drone attack on kyiv since the invasion of the country began in February 2022, depriving dozens of apartment buildings and buildings of electricity.
This offensive takes place the day of commemoration by kyiv of the “crimes” committed by the Soviets during the Stalin era once morest the Ukrainians during the Great Holodomor Famine (see below) in the 1930s, which caused the deaths of millions of people.
On Saturday morning, the Ukrainian Air Force claimed to have shot down 71 drones Shahed attack launched in the night by Russia. “Most of them were destroyed in the kyiv region,” she said.
“The enemy continues to sow terror.”
Five people, including an 11-year-old child, were injured during this offensive, local authorities in kyiv indicated. The air alert in the capital lasted six hours and falling debris from drones caused fires and damaged buildings in the capital, assured Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko. “The enemy continues to sow terror,” he lamented.
The attack also caused large-scale power outages in the capital following the rupture of “an electrical power line”, the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy said in a press release. “As a result, 77 residential buildings and 120 buildings in the central part of the city are without electricity,” he detailed.
Drone attacks are increasing
Drone attackssymptomatic of the war in Ukraine, se have multiplied in recent monthsled by the forces of kyiv and Moscow.
Russia thus claimed on Friday to have destroyed 16 Ukrainian dronesin the south of the country and above the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014 and regularly targeted by kyiv for its strategic positioning in the Black Sea.
The same day, the Ukrainian military said its air defense systems had shot down three Iranian-made attack drones launched by Russian forces overnight.
Commemorations of the Holodomor
©AFP
Saturday’s attack comes as Ukraine commemorates l’Holodomorthe name of the famine that decimated the country during the Soviet era 90 years ago.
In a press release, the head of state judged “impossible to forget, understand and above all forgive the horrific crimes of genocide that Ukrainians endured in the 20th century” during the Holodomor.
Volodymyr Zelensky also thanked the countries which officially recognized this famine as a “deliberate crime” of genocide. Mid-October, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe described this famine as genocidefollowing in the footsteps of the European Parliament a year earlier.
Ukraine had lost four to eight million inhabitants in the great famine of 1932-1933 once morest a backdrop of land collectivization, orchestrated according to historians by Stalin to repress any nationalist and independence desires in this country, then a Soviet republic.
Russia, for its part, categorically refuses the classification of genocideciting the fact that the great famine of the 1930s had not only claimed Ukrainian victims, but also Russians, Kazakhs and other peoples.
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