KYIV, Ukraine — Russia launched a mass attack on southern Ukraine, local officials said, two days after a rare airstrike on central Kyiv killed 23 and damaged European Union diplomatic offices as U.S.-led efforts to end Moscow’s three-year war on its neighbor staggered.
Among other locations hit, the assault overnight into Saturday struck a five-story residential building, killing at least one civilian and wounding 28 people, including children, in the Zaporizhzhia region, Gov. Ivan Fedorov reported.
Russia launched 537 strike drones and decoys, as well as 45 missiles, according to Ukraine’s Air Force. Ukrainian forces shot down or neutralized 510 drones and decoys and 38 missiles, the force reported.
The Kremlin on Thursday said Russia remained interested in continuing peace talks, despite the air attack on Kyiv that day that was one of the largest and deadliest since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Thursday’s strike was one of the few times Russian drones and missiles have penetrated the heart of the Ukrainian capital. Children were among the dead, and search and rescue efforts continued for hours to pull people from the rubble.
Hours after the attack, the United States approved an $825 million arms sale to Ukraine that will include extended-range missiles and related equipment to boost its defensive capabilities, as U.S. efforts to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia appear to have stalled.
Ukraine hits more Russian oil refineries
Separately, Ukraine has continued to strike oil refineries inside Russia that it says have supplied Moscow’s war effort, the Ukrainian General Staff reported Saturday. It said two facilities were hit overnight: in the Krasnodar region near occupied Crimea, and the Samara region further northeast.
Falling drone debris sparked a fire at a refinery in the city of Krasnodar, regional Russian authorities confirmed Saturday. They later said the blaze had been extinguished, damaging one of the facility’s processing units but causing no casualties. The Krasnodar refinery produces approximately 3 million tons per year of petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.
A separate drone strike caused a fire at the Syzran Oil Refinery in the Samara province, according to the Ukrainian General Staff.
Gas stations have run dry in some regions of Russia after Ukrainian drones struck oil infrastructure in recent weeks, with motorists waiting in long lines and officials resorting to rationing or cutting off sales altogether. To try to ease the shortage, Russia has paused gasoline exports, with officials Wednesday declaring a full ban until Sept. 30 and a partial ban affecting traders and intermediaries until Oct. 31.
Analysts expect the gasoline crisis to ease by late September as demand subsides and the annual summer maintenance for many refineries is finished. Still, the shortages have highlighted a vulnerability on the home front that Ukraine could exploit further as drone warfare evolves.
Former Ukrainian parliament speaker shot dead
In a separate development, Ukraine’s former parliament speaker and a prominent pro-Western politician was shot dead in the city of Lviv on Saturday, according to statements by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and local authorities.
Little is known so far about the perpetrator, or why Andriy Parubiy was targeted. Zelenskyy on Saturday decried Parubiy’s “terrible murder,” and promised an investigation.
Parubiy, 54, was a lawmaker from the Lviv region who participated in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 and led self-defense volunteer units during the Maidan protests of 2014, which forced pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych from office. He was parliament speaker from 2016 to 2019.
