Russia has launched its first overnight drone attack on Kyiv after a 12-day break, according to a senior Ukrainian official. Air defense systems preliminarily destroyed all targets on their approach, according to Serhiy Popko, a colonel general who heads Kyiv's military administration.
The Ukrainian capital and several central and eastern Ukrainian regions were under air raid alerts for about an hour after 2am local time (23:00 GMT). There is no immediate information about the scale of the attack. Ukrainian officials reported more civilian casualties from Russian shelling in the country's east and south.
In the eastern front-line Donetsk region, at least three civilians were killed and 17 wounded on Friday and overnight on Saturday. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that fierce clashes continued in three areas in Donetsk where it said Russia has massed troops and attempted to advance.
In Ukraine's southern Kherson region, five people including a child were wounded on Friday and in overnight attacks. Russian forces launched 82 artillery, drone, mortar shell, and rocket attacks on the province, which is cut in two by a stretch of the 1,500km (930 mile) front line and still reeling from flooding unleashed by the collapse of a major Dnipro River dam earlier this month.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a meeting of the country's top military command and atomic energy officials at the Rivne nuclear power plant to discuss the security of northern regions and measures to strengthen them.
Zelenskyy warned that a "serious threat" remained at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine's south and said Russia was "technically ready" to provoke a localized explosion at the facility. Ukraine's nuclear power authority conducted two days of exercises simulating the effects of an attack on the Zaporizhzhia plant. Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, criticized the Ukrainian allegations as "simply preposterous."
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