Russian jet-powered drones have struck a home in northern Ukraine, killing a 29-year-old woman and her 9-year-old son KYIV, Ukraine -- Russian jet-powered drones struck a home in northern Ukraine on Friday, killing a 29-year-old woman and her 9-year-old son, officials said. The strike came a day after the United Nations said July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since the weeks following Moscow's all-out invasion of its neighbor more than four years ago. At least 437 civilians were killed and 2,610 wounded last month, the U.N. monitoring mission in Kyiv said, as Russia escalated its bombing of Ukrainian towns and cities.
Overall, since Russia's invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, U.N. human rights monitors say the war has killed at least 16,874 civilians, including 820 children, and wounded 51,273 injured, including 3,126 children. That trend accelerated sharply in July,” said Danielle Bell, head of the U.N. human rights monitoring mission in Kyiv. In Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, a Russian glide bomb demolished six floors of a 10-story apartment block, killing one person and wounding 16 others, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Russia is launching around 220 glide bombs every day against settlements near the front line in eastern and southern Ukraine, Zelenskyy said in a social media post Friday. Russian forces crush settlements with the brute force of 3,000-pound (1,300-kilo) glide bombs, artillery, missiles and drones, then send in infantry units to attack the exposed defenders. The tactic has rendered many towns and villages uninhabitable.
In all, Russia attacked 12 Ukrainian regions overnight, wounding dozens of people, Zelenskyy said. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, extended their long-range strike campaign against Russian infrastructure, hitting the port of Ust-Luga in the Leningrad region north of Moscow and starting a brief fire, its governor Alexnader Drozdenko said. Ust-Luga is one of Russia’s largest oil and gas export terminals located more than 800 kilometers (500 miles) from Ukraine.
It has been a frequent target of Ukrainian drone attacks this summer, as Kyiv seeks to undermine Russian oil exports that provide Moscow with vital revenue for its war effort. Ukraine also launched another attack on the premises of Wildberries, Russia’s biggest online retailer, which Kyiv says helps supply the Russian military. The attack damaged a wall of a Wildberries warehouse in the Tver region north of Moscow, the region’s acting governor Vitaly Korolyov said.
Wildberries reported “insignificant damage” and said the goods stored at the site were not damaged. The Russian Defense Ministry said Friday its air defenses overnight intercepted 553 Ukrainian drones over 18 Russian regions, as well as occupied Crimea and the waters of the Azov and the Black seas. NATO fighter jets shot down a drone that entered Latvian airspace in the early hours of Friday, the Latvian army and an official for the military alliance said.
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