In addition to blasts in Kyiv, Ukraine’s air defence was also at work in the surrounding region, and explosions were also reported in the cities of Odesa, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, Ukraine’s armed forces said.
Residents were urged to remain in shelters.
Later in the night, there were also explosions in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, with anti-aircraft defences at work, according to the regional military administration.
The regions that heard air raid alarms ringing in the early hours of Thursday morning included Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia, The Kyiv Independent website reported.
A drone was also reported over the Cherkasy region, according to the Euromaidan Press online newspaper.
On Wednesday, the US embassy in Ukraine warned of a “heightened threat of missile attacks.”
It said: “In light of the recent uptick in strikes across Ukraine and inflammatory rhetoric from Moscow, the Department of State cautions U.S. citizens of an ongoing heightened threat of missile attacks, including in Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast.”
On Thursday morning, Ukrainian officials said that, according to preliminary information, “all enemy missiles and UAVs were destroyed,” there were “no casualties among the civilian population” and “no destruction of residential facilities or infrastructure.”
Russian oil refinery reportedly hit in drone attack
Meanwhile, Russian emergency services said they had extinguished a fire at the Ilsky refinery near the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk in Russia’s Krasnodar region, two hours after it was hit in a drone attack, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper reported early on Thursday.
It came a day after a fuel depot further to the west caught on fire near a bridge linking Russia’s mainland with the occupied Crimea peninsula, according to The Guardian.
Kremlin drone attack ‘likely staged’ by Russia: ISW
The drone attack on the Kremlin in the early hours of Wednesday was “likely staged” by Russia, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US think tank, has said.
Russia blamed the attack on Ukraine, an accusation that was denied by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In its latest report on the war in Ukraine, published on Wednesday night, the ISW said that “Russian authorities have recently taken steps to increase Russian domestic air defence capabilities, including within Moscow itself, and it is therefore extremely unlikely that two drones could have penetrated multiple layers of air defence and detonated or been shot down just over the heart of the Kremlin in a way that provided spectacular imagery caught nicely on camera.”
The US think tank added: “The Kremlin’s immediate, coherent, and coordinated response to the incident suggests that the attack was internally prepared in such a way that its intended political effects outweigh its embarrassment.”
Zelensky arrives in the Netherlands
Ukraine’s president arrived in Amsterdam late on Wednesday for his first, unannounced visit to the Netherlands, Polish state news agency PAP reported, citing local media.
Zelensky landed at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on board a Dutch government plane after attending a Nordic summit in Helsinki, Finland, The Guardian reported.
He is set to meet with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the country’s lawmakers, as well as visit the International Criminal Court in The Hague and deliver a speech entitled “No peace without justice for Ukraine,” according to news outlets.
Thursday is day 435 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, The Kyiv Independent, ua.usembassy.gov, ISW, The Guardian