Kyiv Drone Attack: Two Dead, Shaiba Market Burns
Russia sent a wave of drones at Kyiv overnight on September 22 and 23. Two people were killed, the wounded toll kept rising, and the historic Shaiba market near Central Station burned.
Russia fired 161 Shahed type attack drones at Ukraine overnight on September 22 and 23, including jet powered versions, with Kyiv as the main target. Ukraine’s air defense shot down or neutralized 119 of the drones by eight in the morning, but the rest fell on or struck the Ukrainian capital and several other regions, leaving two dead in the city itself and a fire at one of its best known markets.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko updated the toll several times through the day. In the morning he spoke of eight wounded, the Ukrinform news agency relayed his Telegram message about 22 wounded at 1:16 p.m., and by 1:37 p.m. Klitschko had a newer figure still.
We already have two victims of the enemy’s attack on the capital. One man died in hospital, and another was killed. Twenty two residents of the city have been wounded. Sixteen of the wounded are being treated in city hospitals.
A little later, the mayor said that “two people were killed in the Russian strikes, and 25 other residents were wounded,” 17 of whom were being treated in hospitals. The shifting numbers through the day were not a dispute over facts, but a reflection of the fact that the picture on the ground was still being established as crews inspected the hit parts of the city.
What burned in Kyiv
The fire that drew the most attention broke out at the Shaiba market, a round modernist building from the 1970s next to Central Railway Station, home until 2021 to the Velyka Kyshenia supermarket. The station building itself was not damaged, according to Ukrzaliznytsia, but the rail operator temporarily suspended the Kyiv City Express line in both directions because of the heightened air threat. Ukrzaliznytsia CEO Oleksandr Pertsovskyi said railway infrastructure had also been hit and that one company worker was wounded while heading home after a shift.
In the Holosiivskyi district, a drone struck a four story business center, and a warehouse and a gas station were also hit. An Ukrnafta filling station in that part of the city was destroyed outright. In the Solomianskyi district, a second drone damaged a nine story residential building, while debris from downed drones fell between nearby buildings and started a fire on the grounds of a transport company. A warehouse burned in the Darnytskyi district. The attack also hit the data centers of internet providers Pavutina and UTELS, cutting off internet access in parts of Kyiv.
Kyiv region administration head Tymur Tkachenko said that outside the city, in the wider region, 18 sites were damaged and three people were wounded, including a 76 year old man.
Ten dead across Ukraine in 24 hours
The attack on Kyiv was part of a broader Russian strike on Ukraine overnight and into the morning. According to local authorities, ten people were killed and 53 wounded across the country over the previous 24 hours. Donetsk region was hit hardest, where governor Vadym Filashkin said four people died and ten were wounded. In Kherson region two people were killed and eight wounded, in Kharkiv region one person died and 13 were wounded, while in Zaporizhzhia region one man was killed in the village of Kushuhum when a Russian strike damaged his house, and two people were wounded in an attack on a shopping center in Zaporizhzhia itself. Seven people were wounded in Dnipropetrovsk region, two in Zhytomyr region, and at least one person in Sumy.
In Odesa region, a Russian strike hit a cargo ship flying the flag of Antigua and Barbuda. The ship’s captain, a Ukrainian national, was killed, while the rest of the crew was evacuated. Regional governor Oleh Kiper said that “Russia targeted a commercial cargo ship flying the flag of Antigua and Barbuda,” adding that warehouses holding medicine, consumer goods and food were struck twice in a row in the same attack, and that putting out the fire took several hours.
Zelensky warns of a new strike
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky wrote after the attack that Russian forces had launched a large number of drones at Kyiv, a large share of them jet powered.
Russia continues to turn civilian and critical infrastructure into targets: pharmaceutical facilities, gas stations, railways, communication infrastructure and shopping centers.
The attack on Kyiv came on the same day that Zelensky, after a meeting on security and air defense with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, warned that a new, larger Russian strike was being prepared. “We currently have intelligence indicating that Russia is preparing a new mass attack on Ukraine,” the Ukrainian president wrote on social media, without further detail on the substance of that intelligence or on when such an attack might come.
Srpske Novine reported earlier on Ukraine’s strike on a refinery in Kapotnya near Moscow, in which two people were also killed, and on Zelensky’s meeting with Donald Trump in New York. The exchange of strikes between Kyiv and Moscow is thus continuing amid attempts to broker a ceasefire, while the date of any new Russian attack the Ukrainian president warned of remains open for now.
