Russia struck various sites in Ukraine on Friday, including a defense event on the outskirts of Kyiv thought to be showcasing aerial defense technologies like drones.
Sometimes fatal attacks elsewhere in the country disrupted power supplies in five separate regions.ย ย
Meanwhile, Ukraine again struck facilities belonging to Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries, this time in President Vladimir Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg.ย
And in the skies over Romania, NATO jets downed a stray drone on Friday morning, with no immediate reports of casualties or damage.ย
Across the Atlantic, the White House said President Donald Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would hold talks on Tuesday of next week, almost four and a half years after Russia’s full scale invasion.
What happened in Ukraine?
Acting regional military administration head Ruslan Oliinyk said the strike hit the grounds of a privately operated military training site that was hosting an event at the time. The site is some 20-30 kilometers (12-18 miles) from central Kyiv, in the Bucha district.ย
Attorney General Ruslan Kravchenko called the attack a war crime, saying that 10 people were killed and around 100 more were injured.ย
The surrounding area was also struck repeatedly, withย ย Zelenskyy posting images of destruction and rescue efforts from the wider Kyiv region.
He said,ย “Interceptors for Patriot systems are the number one priority,” a reference to the air defense systems made by US arms giant Raytheon, which had sent a delegation to Kyiv on Thursday.ย
Russia’s Defense Ministry also acknowledged the attack online, saying it had used “high-precision long-range weapons” to target “a demonstration of unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs or drones], including promising ones, of Ukrainian and foreign production, used to strike civilian targets in Russia.”ย
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that at the time of the strike, leading defense industry officials and Ukrainian military members were at the site, saying these people were “directly planning and carrying out strikes on Russian territory.”
Five people were reported killed in the eastern region of Slovyansk on Friday. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, bemoaned one such strike that she said hit “Latvia’s Honorary Consulate” in Slovyansk, saying, “We will summon Russia’s envoy to the EU over today’s strikes,” and thatshe would propose further EU sanctions to target Russia’s “military-industrial complex.”ย
Ukraine’s energy company Ukrenergo reported damage to power plants in five separate regions, saying around 150,000 people were left without power in the Chernihiv region alone after an attack on a facility there.ย
What happened in Russia?ย
The latest Ukrainian drone strikes to target warehouses of the online retail giant Wildberries struck in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin’s powerbase for decades, on Friday.ย
Company founder Tatyana Kim said facilities came under attack in St. Petersburg, in the adjacent Leningrad region, and also in occupied Ukraine in Simferopol, a city in illegally annexed Crimea.ย
Large plumes of smoke were visible rising over central St. Petersburg on Friday morning.
Ukraine has struck a series of Wildberries facilities in recent days, causing large fires. It describes the sites as logistics hubs and says it provides components that Russia uses for military equipment like drones. Analysts also speculate that it might be an attempt to make ordinary Russians feel the consequences of the war and sense that their government cannot safeguard their interests.
What happened in Romania?ย
Romania’s Defense Ministry and later NATO also said on Friday that Alliance aircraft had shot down a stray drone that had entered Romanian airspace.ย ย
Bucharest’s Defense Ministry said a Romanian F-16 fighter engaged the drone and neutralized it “over an unpopulated areaย in the vicinity of Padina,ย Buzau County.”
It described a flight path entering its airspace around Sulina, a town bordering the southwestern tip of Ukraine, across the Black Sea from occupied Crimea. Itย headed west and inland, approaching Buzau. After tracking the drone for a little over an hour, a Romanian Air Force jet shot it down just after 11 a.m. local time, the ministry said.ย
Several incidents of stray drones straying into NATO members, more typically in the Baltic but also sometimes further south, have taken place this year. Ukraine tends to blame Russia for scrambling the drones’ navigation systems and causing them to encroach on other countries’ airspace.
Edited by: Sean Sinico
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