Kyiv, Aug 22: Russian drone and missile strikes killed at least two people overnight in Ukraine, officials said Saturday, while a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Krasnodar region killed two others, a day after a strike on a Ukrainian shopping center killed 16 people.
In the latest attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that one person was killed and another wounded when ballistic missiles hit railway infrastructure in the capital, Kyiv.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said that its forces had hit a locomotive depot.
Moscow’s forces have recently intensified their ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv, exploiting Ukraine’s chronic shortage of U.S.-made Patriot air defense interceptors, the sole weapon in its arsenal able to shoot down the missiles.
Russian drone strikes also killed one person overnight in a village in the Zaporizhzhia region, local officials said Saturday. Zelenskyy said that three people were wounded in an attack on a minibus in the regional capital, also called Zaporizhzhia.
In Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, authorities said that two children were killed and two adults were wounded in a Ukrainian drone strike.
The latest attacks came a day after Russian drones struck a shopping center in the city of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine on Friday.
Dnipropetrovsk regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said in the early hours of Saturday that the death toll had risen to 16 and nine people remain missing after the attack, which wounded another 130.
Kryvyi Rih is the hometown of Zelenskyy, who described the attack as a double-tap strike, in which an initial wave of drones hit the area followed by a second wave as rescue workers responded. The Ukrainian leader said the fire, which spread across 9,000 square meters (around 97,000 square feet), had been extinguished and rescue efforts were underway.
Kryvyi Rih has been hit multiple times during the 4½-year all-out war between Russia and Ukraine, with one of the deadliest occurring in April 2025, when 20 people were killed, including nine children.
Large-scale Russian strikes have become a regular occurrence this summer, with Friday’s attacks landing just 24 hours after Russia pounded Kyiv with scores of missiles and drones in a nighttime assault that killed 16 people.
The capital has been hit hard repeatedly in recent weeks: 17 people were killed in a strike on Kyiv and its surrounding region just over two weeks ago, and nine died in another attack on the city two days before that. The United Nations said last week that Kyiv was one of the hardest-hit cities in July, with at least 54 civilians killed and 202 wounded.
At the same time, Ukraine has shifted the war onto Russian soil through long-range drone strikes on oil facilities that have caused fuel shortages across Russia. It also has unsettled the Russian public by striking warehouses of Wildberries, the country’s biggest online retailer.
The Russian online news outlet Astra reported Saturday that a Ukrainian drone set ablaze an oil refinery in the Samara region. Local officials said that damage was recorded at an unidentified “industrial facility” and a logistics center for Ozon, a competitor to Wildberries. (AP)
