Russia on Sunday launched a massive drone and missile barrage against the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, an attack that came after Ukrainian drones hit a college in a Russian-controlled area of the Donbas region on Friday, massacring a group of students.
Russia’s TASS news agency reported that the death toll in the Ukrainian attack on a college dormitory in Starobelsk in the Luhansk Oblast has risen to 21 and that another 42 people were injured. For its part, Ukraine denied responsibility and claimed that it targeted a Russian drone unit in the area, while Russian officials said there were no military targets at the college.
After the attack, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that those responsible for the attack would face “inevitable and severe punishment.” According to AFP, the Ukrainian air force said the Russian attack that targeted Kyiv on Sunday involved 600 drones and 90 missiles.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that the attacks included strikes involving Russia’s advanced missiles, including its Oreshnik hypersonic missile. The ministry said the strikes were a ” response to the terrorist attacks by Ukraine on civilian targets in Russia.”
Ukrainian officials said that two people were killed in Kyiv, 56 were wounded, and another two were killed in the surrounding region. Before the attack, the US embassy in Kyiv said that it had “received information concerning a potentially significant air attack that may occur at any time over the next 24 hours.”
A group of journalists visited the site of the drone attack on the college on Sunday as part of a trip organized by the Russian Foreign Ministry. Yana Lantrova, Russia’s new commissioner for human rights, told journalists that the attack involved three waves of Ukrainian drones. “Sixteen UAVs in total. They waited for the children to run out. They fired directly at the children,” she said, according to Reuters.
