KYIV (Reuters) -Russia launched a drone strike on Kyiv early on Wednesday, and an old man was killed in Russian shelling in southern Ukraine as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met NATO leaders in Lithuania, Ukrainian officials said.
There were no deaths in the second attack on the capital in successive days. But an 81-year-old man was killed and his 82-year-old wife wounded in shelling of the southern city of Kherson, Kherson region governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.
Eighteen people, including six children, were also wounded in a Russian attack on a residential area in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia at about 1:00 p.m. (1000 GMT), Zaporizhzhia region governor Yuriy Malashko said.
The Russian shelling and heavy fighting did not stop as Zelenskiy was meeting NATO leaders to discuss security threats posed by Moscow, which denounced the Western military alliance’s summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
Ukraine shot down 11 out of 15 Iranian-made Shahed drones fired by Russia overnight, and two people were hurt in a fire caused by the attack on Kyiv, officials said.
“A difficult night … The enemy attacked our area with ‘Shaheds’,” Ihor Taburets, the military head of the Cherkasy region southeast of Kyiv, said on the Telegram messaging app.
Ukraine’s military said on Wednesday morning Russian forces had carried out 65 air strikes and fired at least 71 times from heavy weapon rocket systems at Ukrainian troop positions and populated areas along frontlines in the previous 24 hours.
On Tuesday, Russia drones also attacked Kyiv and the southern port of Odesa, and Kherson came under artillery fire.
In the latest fighting, a Ukrainian military spokesperson reported some “success” near the Russian-occupied eastern city of Bakhmut but gave few details as Kyiv’s troops pressed on with a counteroffensive launched early last month.
Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports and denies deliberately targeting civilians. Russia’s TASS news agency cited military groupings as saying they had repelled several Ukrainian attacks in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine over the past day.
(Reporting by Olena Harmash, Anna Pruchnicka and Lidia Kelly; Editing by Timothy Heritage)
