KYIV (Reuters) -Russia launched attacks on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, the Black Sea port of Odesa and the southern region of Kherson on Tuesday before the start of a NATO summit in Lithuania where security threats from Moscow were on the agenda.
No deaths were reported in overnight drone strikes on Kyiv and Odesa, but Russian shelling killed a woman in the southern village of Sofiivka and wounded two people in Kherson city, Kherson governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.
Air alerts were issued across Ukraine and fighting continued as NATO leaders gathered for a summit which the Kremlin criticized, warning that Moscow would respond to protect its own security.
“The enemy attacked Kyiv from the air for the second time this month,” Serhiy Popko, head of the Kyiv military administration, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
The air force said 26 of the 28 kamikaze Iranian-made Shahed drones launched by Russia overnight had been shot down.
The military said falling debris had damaged a number of buildings in the Kyiv region. An administrative building at Odesa port was also damaged, and a fire was quickly extinguished at a grain terminal near the port, officials said.
Hours later, Prokudin said the southern region’s main city, also called Kherson, was being shelled by Russian troops based in an occupied part of the region. He said an unspecified humanitarian headquarters and five residential buildings had been hit, and that two people had been wounded.
At the Vilnius summit, NATO leaders said Ukraine would receive a “positive message” as it seeks membership. Moscow has cited NATO‘s eastward expansion as a factor in its decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022.
Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians.
(Writing by Lidia Kelly and Anna Pruchnicka; Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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