A Russian missile attack against the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv during rush hour has killed at least one person and injured at least a dozen more – as well as damaging six embassies.
The attack knocked out heating to 630 residential buildings, 16 medical facilities, and 30 schools and nurseries, the city administration said, and falling missile debris caused damage and sparked fires in three districts.
Ukraine‘s foreign ministry said that the embassies of Albania, Argentina, Palestine, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Portugal, housed in the same building, were also damaged as a result of the strike. There were no casualties among diplomatic staff, it said.
“This is another barbaric attack by Russia on civilian targets that shows no willingness for peace,” the European Union’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on X.
Some of the stained glass windows of St Nicholas Roman Catholic Church were also blown out. Ukraine’s cultural minister Mykola Tochytskyi described the church as “a monument of national significance”.
Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down five Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missiles used to attack the capital. They added that Russia had fired 40 drones at targets across Ukraine overnight, with an additional 20 downed before they reached their targets.
In the southeastern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian missile also struck and badly damaged a two-storey residence, injuring five people, including two pulled alive from under the rubble, officials said.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said one person had been killed in the attack on the capital. The Kyiv city administration said 12 people had been injured, including five who had been taken to hospital.
Photos from Kyiv showed the wrecked roof of an office block with blown out windows in central Kyiv and firefighters extinguishing a fire after a car was heavily damaged on the street below.
Russia's Defence Ministry claimed that it had struck a command centre used by Ukraine’s SBU security service in the attack. Kyiv did not suggest that was the case.
The strikes came as a Russian general killed in an assassination claimed by the SBU was buried with full military honours on Friday. Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who was chief of Russia's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, was the most senior Russian officer to be killed inside Russia by Ukraine.
He was killed outside his Moscow apartment building on Tuesday along with his assistant when a bomb attached to an electric scooter went off in an attack for which Ukraine's SBU took responsibility.
State news agency RIA said Kirillov was buried in a ceremony outside Moscow attended by Defence Minister Andrei Belousov and Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia's Security Council.
It said the ceremony had taken place at a Defence Ministry memorial complex called the Pantheon of the Defenders of the Fatherland.
Video footage of the funeral showed an honour guard carrying a coffin draped in the national flag and Kirillov's cap on top of it as solemn music played. The honour guard then fired shots into the air in a snow-covered cemetery as the national anthem played and mourners looked on. Among giant wreaths were two sent by President Vladimir Putin and former President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council and has called for the masterminds of the killing in Urkaine to be destroyed.
Russia has been carrying out airstrikes on Kyiv and other targets, particularly energy infrastructure, as its forces advance in the industrial regions of eastern Ukraine before expected peace efforts next year.
It comes as the Ukrainian military announced it had withdrawn forces from areas in the eastern Donetsk region to avoid being encircled by advancing Russian troops. Ukraine’s Khortytsia group of forces said on Telegram they were pulling troops from the area around the villages of Uspenivka and Trudove.
With the war now in its 33rd month, Ukrainian forces are engaged in intense defensive battles in the eastern region and are stretched thin as the Russians press forward along the front line.
“The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has decided to withdraw the units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces from the area in question to avoid encirclement,” Ukraine’s Khortytsia group said.
Military units had avoided being surrounded and would continue operations in the Kurakhove-Konstantinopolske area, a statement said, a few miles further back from the frontline.
Ukraine’s General Staff reported 18 battles on the Kurakhove front in the past day with Russian forces attempting to advance to the north of the town.
The Russian Defence Ministry said on Friday its forces had taken control of two more settlements in Donetsk region, Uspenivka and Novopustynka. It claimed control of Trudove on Wednesday.
