Kyiv under fire from Russian missiles after EU-Ukraine sign drone deal - Al Jazeera

Russia and Ukraine have traded deadly strikes – including a Russian assault on Kyiv – a day after Ukraine sealed a landmark deal with the European Union expected to boost its drone capabilities and as President Volodomyr Zelenskyy moves to replace his popular defence minister .

Russian ballistic missiles rained down on multiple districts of Kyiv overnight into Thursday, killing two people and injuring six others, including a 16-year-old boy, according to the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko.

A Russian guided bomb also killed at least three people in ⁠Ukraine’s southern city of Zaporizhzhia, said the local governor, Ivan Fedorov. Houses and ⁠non-residential buildings were ⁠damaged, he added.

On the other side of the war border, Ukrainian shelling killed a 15-year-old girl and her grandmother in the western Russian border region of Bryansk, the region’s acting governor, Yegor Kovalchuk, said.

Another man was killed in a drone raid on Russia’s Yaroslavl region, some 300km (190 miles) northeast of Moscow, local authorities said. Ukraine’s ⁠military, meanwhile, ⁠claimed it struck six Russian tankers and two ⁠tugboats in the ⁠Black Sea and Sea of Azov the night before.

The tankers were being used to transport Russian oil and petroleum products in circumvention of international sanctions, as well as to transport fuel for Moscow’s military, the general staff said on Telegram.

The flurry of attacks came a day after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited the Ukrainian capital and announced a new “drone deal” between Ukraine and the European Union.

The agreement aims to combine Kyiv’s battlefield expertise with the EU’s industrial capacity to establish joint projects and rapidly scale up production.

Speaking at a ceremony to mark Ukraine’s Statehood Day, von der Leyen emphasised the need to “combine our strengths”, stating that the deal would “bring together Ukrainian ingenuity and Europe’s industrial scale”.

She added that the EU could offer Kyiv significant advantages, including “huge technological and industrial capacity” alongside “safe and secure production sites” to support the initiative.

More than four years into the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, escalating strikes from both sides over the past several months have resulted in a rising toll of civilian casualties.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian regional officials reported that a series of Russian bombardments across the country killed 13 people and left approximately 50 others injured.

Despite Russia’s stepped-up use of ballistic missiles, Ukraine’s own strikes on Russia’s oil sector and military logistics have helped propel Ukraine to its best battlefield position since late 2022.

Against this backdrop, Zelenskyy’s decision to remove the defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who had been credited with boosting drone warfare during his six months on the job, prompted protests in Kyiv on Thursday.

Zelenskyy has appointed the acting head of Ukraine’s security service, Yevhenii Khmara, to serve as acting defence minister and ⁠has asked parliament to approve him for the position.