Russia launches deadly jet-powered drone attacks on Kyiv petrol stations as Zelensky condemns ‘terrorist’ escalation

Russia has attacked two Kyiv petrol stations with jet-powered drones, killing two people in an escalation of strikes that President Volodymyr Zelensky said were becoming “increasingly terrorist in nature.”

Two more people were killed in Russian strikes in southeastern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region and in Kharkiv in the northeast on Friday, according to the regions’ governors.

Ukraine also carried out drone attacks on Russia, killing two people in the Tula region overnight and one on Friday in the Kursk region, local officials said.

With fighting on the front line largely stalled more than four-and-a-half years into the war in Ukraine, Moscow and Kyiv have increasingly struck logistics and other economic targets in recent weeks to try to damage the other’s war effort.

Russia has for two weeks been carrying out almost constant attacks with faster jet-powered drones that have killed a number of Kyiv residents and disrupted daily life in the capital.

The attacks were paused while US peace negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Kyiv at the weekend, but then resumed.

“Russia’s escalation with jet-powered ‘shaheds’ is gradually becoming increasingly terrorist in nature,” Zelensky said on X.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war, triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The two people killed in Kyiv were at one of the two petrol stations that were attacked, officials said, one by a double-tap strike.

Friday’s strikes followed what appeared to be the first attack on a Kyiv petrol station a day earlier. In recent months, Russia has hit some 300 petrol stations, mainly in or near Ukraine’s frontline regions.

A further 12 people, including a 12-year-old boy, were injured in Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. An attack on a Kyiv residential block injured eight people overnight.

Zelensky said Russia had hit a building used by Ukraine’s largest mobile operator, Kyivstar, in Kyiv, and there were strikes in eight other Ukrainian regions. Kyivstar’s network continued to operate, the company said.

A woman was killed in the Kyiv region surrounding the capital, the regional governor said.

The governor of Dnipropetrovsk region, Oleksandr Hanzha, said one person was killed and 19 injured in attacks across his region. All but one of the injured were in the city of Dnipro.