KYIV: Ukraine hit more oil facilities deep inside Russia in overnight attacks, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday, as Kyiv kept up its campaign to undermine Moscow’s wartime economy and embarrass the Kremlin.
The repeated strikes have caused fuel shortages and rattled Russians. Ukrainians, meanwhile, are enduring regular barrages that Kyiv’s depleted air defenses are struggling to counter amid Moscow’s 4-year-old full-scale invasion.
The Kyiv region observed an official day of mourning Thursday after a Russian missile and drone blitz killed 17 people the previous day, prompting an increasingly urgent scramble by Ukraine and its allies to find new air defense supplies.
In the first six months of this year, 1,396 civilians were killed and 7,978 injured in Ukraine, the United Nations office in Kyiv said Wednesday. That was a 37 percent increase from the same period last year and a 114 percent jump over 2024, it said, attributing the rise to more long-range aerial attacks by Russia.
Zelensky said he met with senior officials on how to accelerate the development of Ukraine’s own ballistic weaponry, similar to its swift wartime innovation in drone technology.
