Russia pounds Kyiv with largest drone attack, hours after Trump-Putin call

By Pavel Polityuk and Olena Harmash

KYIV (Reuters) -Russia pummelled Kyiv with the largest drone attack of the war, injuring at least 23 people and damaging buildings across the capital only hours after U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russia's Vladimir Putin, officials said on Friday.

Air raid sirens, the whine of kamikaze drones and booming detonations reverberated from early evening until dawn as Russia launched what Ukraine's Air Force said was a total of 539 drones and 11 missiles.

Residents huddled with families in underground metro stations for shelter. Acrid smoke hung over the city centre.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is due to speak to Trump later on Friday about the war and a U.S. pause in some deliveries of air defence missiles, called the attack "deliberately massive and cynical."

"Notably, the first air raid alerts in our cities and regions yesterday began to blare almost simultaneously with media reports discussing a phone call between President Trump and Putin," Zelenskiy said on X.

"Yet again, Russia is showing it has no intention of ending the war and terror," he added, calling for increased pressure on Russia and more air defence equipment.

Kyiv officials said the attack damaged about 40 apartment blocks, passenger railway infrastructure, five schools and kindergartens, cafes and many cars in six of Kyiv's 10 districts. Poland said the consular section of its embassy was damaged in central Kyiv, adding that staff were unharmed.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram that fourteen of the injured were hospitalised.

Ukraine's state-owned railway Ukrzaliznytsia, the country's largest carrier, said on Telegram that the attack on Kyiv forced them to divert a number of passenger trains, causing delays. 

Damage was recorded on both sides of the wide Dnipro River bisecting the city and falling drone debris set a medical facility on fire in the leafy Holosiivskyi district, Klitschko said.

Russian air strikes on Kyiv have intensified in recent weeks and included some of the deadliest assaults of the war on the city of three million people.

CALL FOR SANCTIONS

Trump said that the call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday resulted in no progress at all on efforts to end the war, while the Kremlin reiterated that Moscow would keep pushing to solve the conflict's "root causes".

A decision by Washington earlier this week to halt some shipments of critical weapons to Ukraine prompted warnings by Kyiv that the move would weaken its ability to defend against intensifying airstrikes and battlefield advances.

On Friday, Zelenskiy called for increased pressure on Moscow to change its "dumb, destructive behavior".

"For every such strike against people and human life, they must feel appropriate sanctions and other blows to their economy, their revenues, and their infrastructure," he said.

SHELTERED

Ukraine's Air Force said that it destroyed 478 of the air weapons Russia launched overnight. However air strikes were recorded in eight locations across the country with nine missiles and 63 drones, it added.

Social media videos showed people running to seek shelter, firefighters fighting blazes in the dark and ruined buildings with windows and facades blown out.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian. Many more soldiers are believed to have died on the frontlines, although neither side releases military casualty figures. 

Late on Thursday, Russian shelling killed five people in and near the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a key target under Russian attack for months, Ukraine said.

(Reporting by Olena Harmash, Pavel Polityuk, Valentyn Ogirenko, Sergiy Karazy and Frank Jack Daniel; Writing by Ronald Popeski, Lidia Kelly and Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Stephen Coates, Raju Gopalakrishnan, Alexandra Hudson)