Ukraine accused Russia on Saturday of carrying out its largest drone attack on Kiev overnight since the start of the country’s invasion in February 2022, depriving dozens of residential buildings and buildings of electricity. buildings. This offensive comes on the day Kiev commemorates the “crimes” committed by the Soviets during the Stalin era against the Ukrainians during the great famine of the 1930s, which caused the death of millions of people.
Five injured and large-scale power cuts in the capital
On Saturday morning, the Ukrainian Air Force claimed to have shot down 71 Shahed attack drones launched overnight by Russia. “Most of them were destroyed in the kyiv region,” she said. Five people, including an 11-year-old child, were injured during this offensive, local authorities in kyiv said.
The air alert in the capital lasted six hours and falling debris from drones caused fires and damaged buildings in the capital, assured Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko. “The enemy continues to sow terror,” he lamented.
The attack also caused large-scale power outages in the capital after “an electricity supply line was broken”, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said in a statement. “As a result, 77 residential buildings and 120 buildings in the central part of the city are without electricity,” he detailed.
Drone attacks have increased in recent months
Drone attacks, symptomatic of the war in Ukraine, have increased in recent months, carried out by forces from both kyiv and Moscow. Russia thus claimed on Friday to have destroyed 16 Ukrainian drones, in the south of the country and above the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014 and regularly targeted by Kiev for its strategic positioning in the Black Sea.
The same day the Ukrainian army declared that its air defense systems had shot down three Iranian-made attack drones launched by Russian forces overnight.
Commemoration of the Holodomor
Saturday’s attack comes as Ukraine commemorates the Holodomor, the name of the famine that decimated the country during the Soviet era 90 years ago. “More than 70 Shahed (drones) during the night of the Holodomor commemoration (…). Russian leaders are proud of their ability to kill,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially reacted. In a press release, the head of state then deemed it “impossible to forget, understand and above all forgive the horrible crimes of genocide that Ukrainians endured in the 20th century” during the Holodomor. Mr. Zelensky also thanked the countries which officially recognized this famine as a “deliberate crime” of genocide.
In mid-October, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe described this famine as genocide, following in the footsteps of the European Parliament a year earlier. Ukraine lost four to eight million inhabitants in the great famine of 1932-1933, against a backdrop of land collectivization, orchestrated according to historians by Stalin to repress any nationalist and independence desires in this country, then a Soviet republic.
Russia, for its part, categorically refuses the classification of genocide, citing the fact that the great famine of the 1930s had not only caused Ukrainian victims, but also Russians, Kazakhs and other peoples.