At least 22 drones shot down over Ukrainian capital during air raid

By Burc Eruygur

ISTANBUL (AA) - At least 22 drones were shot down over Ukraine's capital Kyiv early on Monday, amid an air raid alert sounded in multiple regions of the country, the city's military administration said.

The Kyiv City Military Administration said in a message on Telegram that 20 missiles were initially shot down over the city, with the count rising to 22 in a later statement.

"As a result of the night shelling of the capital, energy infrastructure facilities were damaged. There are emergency power outages in the city. Accordingly, there are de-energized heat supply facilities," Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a separate statement on Telegram.

Klitschko had said earlier that explosions were heard in the district of Desnianskyi in Kyiv, with one person hospitalized due to the strike. He later announced that a 46-year-old man had died from his wounds from separate attacks on Saturday.

"According to the Air Defense Forces, 40 kamikaze drones were heading for Kyiv at night. 15 were destroyed over neighboring regions, with three (shot down) in the Kyiv region and 22 drones over the capital," Klitschko added.

Private Ukrainian energy provider DTEK later announced that an emergency blackout had been imposed due to the damage inflicted on the capital's energy infrastructure.

Air raid alerts were sounded in Kyiv, as well as the Sumy, Poltava, Cherkasy, Kharkiv, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, and Chernihiv regions.

"In the Kamian district, debris from a downed barrage munition fell on a private enterprise. There was a fire. Firefighters have already extinguished the fire," Dnipropetrovsk Governor Valentyn Reznichenko said on Telegram, adding that strikes had taken place in the Nikopol district.

Air raid alerts sound in Ukraine on an almost daily basis due to missile and drone strikes that have targeted the country's civilian and energy infrastructure. Such strikes rose dramatically after an October explosion damaged Russia's key Kerch Bridge to the Crimean Peninsula.