Kiev (Ukraine) (AFP) – Ukraine accused Russia on Saturday of launching a night attack using drones, which it said was the largest since the start of the invasion of this country in February 2022, which deprived dozens of residential buildings and facilities of electricity.
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The attack came on a day when Ukraine commemorated “crimes” committed by the Soviets during the reign of Joseph Stalin against the Ukrainians in the 1930s during the great famine that caused the death of millions.
On Saturday morning, the Ukrainian Air Force said it shot down 71 Shahed attack drones launched by Russia overnight.
He explained that “most of them were destroyed in the Kiev region.”
Five people, including an eleven-year-old child, were injured in this attack, according to what local authorities in Kiev said.
The air warning in Kiev continued for six hours, and the attack caused debris, fire, and damage to buildings in the capital, according to what the capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said.
He added, “The enemy continues to sow terror and terrorism.”
The attack also caused a power outage in dozens of residential buildings and more than a hundred facilities.
The Ministry of Energy said in a statement, “On the morning of November 25, a large-scale drone attack caused the disruption of a high-tension line.” She added, “As a result, power was cut off to 77 residential buildings and 120 facilities in the center of the capital.”
Attacks using drones have increased in recent months, whether by Russia or Ukraine.
Russia confirmed on Friday that it had destroyed 16 Ukrainian drones in the south of the country and over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 and which Kiev regularly targets because of its strategic location in the Black Sea.
On the same day, the Ukrainian army said that air defense systems shot down three Iranian-made attack drones launched by Russian forces at night.
Memory of famine
Saturday’s attack came as Ukraine commemorated the Holodomor, the great famine to which millions were subjected in the country during the reign of the late Soviet leader Stalin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media, “More than 70 marches on the night of the anniversary of the Great Famine… The Russian leadership is proud of the fact that it is capable of killing.”
He stressed in a statement, “It is impossible for us to forget the horrific crimes of genocide that Ukrainians suffered during the twentieth century, let alone understand and forgive them.”
Zelensky also thanked the countries that officially recognized this famine as a “premeditated crime of genocide.”
In mid-October, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe described this famine as genocide, following the example of the European Parliament, which had adopted this description a year earlier.
Four to eight million people died in Ukraine in the great famine between 1932 and 1933 due to the nationalization of lands that, according to historians, Stalin planned to suppress the national aspirations and independence of this country, which was then a Soviet republic.
Russia, for its part, categorically rejects classifying the famine as genocide, and stresses that the great famine of the 1930s did not claim only Ukrainian victims, but also from Russians and other peoples.
© 2023 AFP
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2023-11-25 10:55:07
