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A second air-raid alert was declared for Kyiv and most of Ukraine in the early afternoon on August 1, just hours after a first alert that followed a Russian drone strike that destroyed a college dormitory in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv.
Authorities said the alert was prompted by the heightened likelihood of Russian drone and missile strikes after Ukraine’s General Staff said that Russian forces carried out nine missile and 57 air strikes on Ukraine over the past 24 hours.
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At least one person was wounded in the attack on Kharkiv, which Mayor Ihor Terekhov said targeted the city’s densely populated suburbs and involved at least three drones.
“One of the drones destroyed two floors of one of the dormitories,” Terekhov said.
Regional police chief Volodymyr Tymoshko told national television that one person was wounded. Kharkiv, which is close to the border with Russia, has been frequently targeted by Russian strikes.
But the deputy regional governor, Yevhen Ivanov, said it was the first time that Kharkiv was struck by drones, and not my missiles as before.
In Moscow, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the Russian capital repelled a Ukrainian drone attack early on August 1 but one office tower was damaged, while one of the city’s main airports was briefly closed.
“Several drones were downed by air-defense systems while attempting to reach Moscow. One hit the same tower in the city as last time,” Sobyanin wrote on Telegram, referring to the building that was struck in a previous drone attack over the weekend.
Sobyanin said the drone attack didn’t cause any casualties.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a message on Telegram that two drones had been shot down in suburbs west of the city center.
“Another one was hit by radio-electronic equipment and, having run out of control, crashed on the territory of the complex of nonresidential buildings at Moskva Citi,” the ministry said, referring to a business center in the capital.
The office building complex is the headquarters of a number of government agencies, including the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Digital Development and Communications, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
An official from the Ministry of Economic Development said the ministry’s employees were continuing to work remotely after the drone strikes while the damage to the building is being assessed.
Moscow’s Vnukovo international airport, one of the three major airports of the Russian capital, was briefly closed after the attack, TASS state news agency reported.
In the eastern region of Donetsk, two civilians were killed by Russian shelling over the past 24 hours, regional Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Telegram on August 1.
The previous day, six people, including a 10-year-old child, were killed and 22 others were wounded in a missile strike on a high-rise apartment building in the southern city of Kryviy Rih.
On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces have been engaged in heavy fighting along the entire front line, fighting more than 40 close-combat battles over the past day, the General Staff of Ukraine’s military said in its daily report on August 1.
The British Ministry of Defense, in its daily intelligence bulletin, reported “intense fighting” in southern Ukraine.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on August 1 that Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of Russia’s armed forces, had visited Russian troops in Ukraine’s southern region of Zaporizhzhya.
The previous day, Deputy Ukrainian Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported advances in the counteroffensive in Zaporizhzhya.
“We are gradually but surely moving [ahead] in the Berdyansk and Melitopol directions,” Malyar said on Telegram, adding, “Fighting continues in all directions of the counteroffensive.”
Separately, Russia on August 1 said it had repelled an overnight attack by Ukrainian naval drones that targeted its patrol boats in the Black Sea.
“During the night, Ukrainian armed forces tried without success to attack with three drones the Sergei Kotov and Vasily Bykov, patrol boats of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement, adding that the drones were destroyed some 340 kilometers southwest of Sevastopol, the port that houses Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on the occupied Crimea Peninsula.
The claim could not be independently verified.
Tensions in the Black Sea have been on the rise since Russia refused to extend a Turkey- and UN-sponsored deal that had made possible the safe export of Ukrainian grain by sea.
With reporting by Reuters and AFP
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