Russian attacks on Kyiv area kill 10 and injure dozens, Ukraine says

By Pavel Polityuk

KYIV (Reuters) -Waves of Russian drones and missiles in and around Kyiv overnight killed 10 people including one child, lit up the night sky with fires in residential areas and damaged the entrance to a metro station bomb shelter, Ukrainian officials said on Monday.

Rescue workers pulled bodies from the rubble of an apartment block in Kyiv's busy Shevchenkivskyi district, less than a kilometre from the U.S. embassy. At least nine people died in the district, the interior ministry said.

Valeriy Mankuta, 33, described clambering from his window to the third floor below to escape after his building was hit by what authorities said was a missile. Reuters photos showed several explosions above apartment buildings in the area. 

"There were bricks on me, there was something in my mouth. It was total hell. I woke up in the rubble," said Mankuta, a construction worker. 

At least 34 people including four children were wounded in the attacks on Kyiv, the emergencies service said. 

From midnight until almost dawn, the city shook with explosions and rattling machine gun fire from anti-aircraft units aiming at the drones.

Ukraine's air force said it had downed 339 of 352 drones and 15 of 16 missiles launched by Russia in the attack on four Ukrainian regions.

In a separate missile attack on the Ukrainian Black Sea region of Odesa around midday on Monday, at least two people were killed and 12 wounded, local governor Oleh Kiper said.

Moscow has stepped up drone and missile strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities in recent weeks as talks to end the war, which began with Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, yielded few results. 

Monday's strikes come a day before NATO's annual summit is held in The Hague, while President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited Britain to discuss defence.

Thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict - the vast majority of them Ukrainian - although both sides deny targeting them. Russia has not commented on the latest attacks.

UNIVERSITY, METRO SHELTER HIT

Firefighters battled a blaze at the swimming pool of the National Technical University, also known as the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Reuters photos showed. The large campus has a department working on aerospace technology. Several academic buildings and four dormitories were also hit, the polytechnic said.

Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said people could still be under the rubble of buildings after the overnight attacks caused damage in six of the city's 10 districts.

An entrance to the metro station in Kyiv's Sviatoshynskyi district was also damaged, officials said. 

Kyiv's deep metro stations have been used throughout the war as some of the city's safest bomb shelters.

In the broader Kyiv region that surrounds the Ukrainian capital, a 68-year-old woman was killed and at least eight people were injured, officials said.      

Russia launched one of its deadliest attacks on Kyiv last week, when hundreds of drones killed 28 people and injured more than 150. 

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Gleb Garanich; Writing by Lidia Kelly in Warsaw, Anastasiia Malenko and Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Tom Hogue, Raju Gopalakrishnan, Aidan Lewis and Hugh Lawson)