Russian airstrikes killed at least eight people in Ukraine on Thursday, including one in Kyiv, in attacks that spread to the western city of Lviv, forcing neighboring Poland to scramble with fighter jets to protect its airspace.
The attacks come as President Volodymyr Zelensky returns from the United States, where he said President Donald Trump agreed to give Ukraine licenses for Patriot missiles.
Air raid warnings were sounded in many parts of Ukraine, while a Reuters witness said explosions were heard in Kyiv. A few non-residential sites caught fire, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on the Telegraph’s message program.
One person was killed and two others were injured in the capital, emergency services said, and six others, including two children, were killed in the Dnipropetrovsk region. One person was killed in Poltava, regional officials said.
In Zelensky’s hometown, the central city of Kryvyi Rih, two girls aged 5 and 12 were among six people killed, while eight others were wounded in what Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the city’s defense council, said was a direct attack by a Russian Iskander-M ballistic missile.
“Dark night,” Vilkul said on Telegram, adding that a missile, fired from Russia’s Voronezh region, hit the home of a large family, and warned that the death toll could rise as emergency workers cleared the rubble.
