Russian drones target Kyiv for 2nd day, Ukraine warns of ‘weaponised winter’

Russian forces on Friday, 28 August resumed their drone barrage of the Kyiv region, damaging more than a dozen apartment buildings and warehouses on the second straight day of aerial attacks, Ukrainian officials said.

Prolonged air raids on Kyiv on Thursday effectively locked down the capital for 15 hours, choking economic activity and severely disrupting civilian life, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said. Longer alerts are a daily reality in regions closer to the front line, it said, more than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Russian drone and missile attacks are also increasingly targeting Ukraine’s power grid in what officials describe as an annual campaign to “weaponise winter”. In the southern Kherson region, where glide bombs forced a combined heat and power plant to shut down a day earlier, authorities warned of prolonged power and heating outages and urged residents who can to move to safer areas.

Russian strikes in the Kyiv region damaged 14 warehouses, 16 private houses, three apartment buildings and 16 vehicles, Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv regional military administration, said Friday.

The State Emergency Service said a second drone struck one location after emergency crews arrived, in what the military calls a “double tap” targeting first responders. One person was killed and two were wounded in the attacks, officials said.

The Russian defence ministry said its forces overnight struck a warehouse storing Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missiles and rocket-booster fuel in the Kyiv region. Ukrainian officials did not immediately confirm the claim, which the Associated Press could not independently verify.

The attacks continued into daylight, prompting Tkachenko to urge residents to remain in shelters and heed air raid alerts. Authorities also warned that air quality had deteriorated in some areas and advised residents to keep windows closed and limit time outdoors.

Russia is using small numbers of fast-moving, jet-powered drones in waves in an attempt to overwhelm Kyiv’s air defences and exhaust the population, said Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation. “The goal is to exhaust air defences and the population,” he said on social media.

In southern Kherson, about 70 per cent of which is under Russian control, authorities urged tens of thousands of residents to relocate to safer regions ahead of potentially prolonged power and heating outages this winter.

'Kherson may be without electricity and heat not for hours or days, but for a long time. And we need to prepare for this now,' Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the regional military administration, said in a social media post late Thursday.

Russia has intensified attacks on critical infrastructure in the region, with 170 glide bombs dropped since 1 July — more than during the first six months of the year, Prokudin said.

Russia has also launched more than 1,700 attack drones over the past two months, increasingly using jet-powered Shahed and Gerbera drones against critical infrastructure, he said. Smaller drone attacks rose to 6,500 in the past week alone.

Authorities will provide assistance with evacuation, transportation, resettlement and social support to residents who leave, Prokudin said.

Ukraine’s economy ministry is cutting its 2026 GDP growth forecast as Russian attacks disrupt exports, particularly grain shipments through Black Sea ports. Growth is now expected at around 0.8 per cent this year, down from an earlier forecast of 1.3 per cent, economy minister Oleksandr Kravchenko said, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

Ukraine’s economy grew 0.6 per cent in the first quarter and posted modest growth by the end of June, Kravchenko said this week. But further expansion is being constrained by damage to energy and logistics infrastructure and blockades at ports.

Russia launched 164 drones at Ukraine overnight, Ukraine’s air force said, without mentioning missiles. A 61-year-old man was killed and seven others wounded Friday in a Russian glide-bomb attack on the northern Sumy region, said Oleh Hryhorov, head of the regional military administration.

The Russian defence ministry said its air defences shot down 512 Ukrainian drones overnight over 18 Russian regions, as well as Crimea and the Black Sea.

Ukrainian forces struck the Slavneft-YANOS refinery in Russia’s Yaroslavl region overnight, causing a fire, Ukraine’s General Staff said. The refinery, about 1,000 km from Ukraine’s border, produces gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel, fuel oil, lubricants and other petroleum products.

A Ukrainian drone attack in the Yaroslavl region on Friday morning killed one person and wounded 27 others, regional governor Mikhail Yevrayev said. Ten people were injured when drone debris fell on a bus.

He said unspecified industrial infrastructure, residential areas and retail facilities were also hit. In the Moscow region, a drone struck a supermarket, damaging it and shattering windows at a nearby outpatient clinic, governor Andrei Vorobyov said.

In Sevastopol in Russian-annexed Crimea, a drone caused significant damage to a five-storey residential building, said Russian-installed governor Mikhail Razvozhayev. Four people were wounded, he said.

With AP/PTI inputs