Russian strikes on Kyiv kill one, damage medical facilities

KYIV – A Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital late on Oct 26 killed one person and wounded eight, mayor Vitali Klitschko said, adding that medical facilities and a dormitory were damaged.Russia has intensified drone and missile attacks on Ukraine in recent weeks, putting Kyiv – a city of around three million people – on a near-constant state of alert.Moscow’s latest pummelling has damaged medical facilities in the capital, Klitschko said, adding that a “blast wave shattered the windows in (an) intensive care unit”.“At another medical facility in the same district, windows were also shattered in two wards. Neither patients nor medical staff were wounded,” he said on social media.In another attack, “a building in a non-residential area was also hit. According to preliminary reports, there is one fatality near one of the supermarkets in the area”, Klitschko said.A strike near a dormitory belonging to one of Kyiv’s universities has shattered windows in the building, wounding a 20-year-old woman, Klitschko said.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “Russian ballistic missiles struck the grounds of a university in Kyiv and the area around it –- effectively the campus, Kyoto Park, the area near a metro station, and residential buildings.”“The missiles hit very crowded areas, and there is not a single military facility nearby. This was a strike directly on the city, on its infrastructure,” he said on social media.The strikes come hours before a truce in the ravaged Russian-occupied city of Oleshky was expected to start after months of reports that residents faced dire food, water and medicine shortages.Moscow said on Oct 26 it would consider more local truces for humanitarian purposes but vowed not to let up in the overall pace of the war, even as the sides prepare to restart stalled talks under US mediation next month. AFP