Daily Times

Russia confirmed Friday it carried out an air strike on Kyiv during a visit by the UN chief, the first such attack on the Ukrainian capital in nearly two weeks, and in which a journalist also died.

Vera Gyrych, a producer for the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, died when a Russian missile slammed into the building where she lived in Kyiv, the media group said. Russia’s defence ministry said it had deployed “high-precision, long-range air-based weapons” that it added “have destroyed the production buildings of the Artyom missile and space enterprise in Kyiv”.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes, which immediately followed his talks with Guterres, were an attempt by Russia “to humiliate the UN and everything that the organisation represents”. Earlier that day, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had toured Bucha and other suburbs of Kyiv where Moscow is alleged to have committed war crimes. Russia denies killing civilians. Germany condemned the “inhumane” attack that showed Russian President Vladimir Putin has “no respect whatsoever for international law”. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said there had been “two hits in the Shevchenkovsky district”, with one hitting “the lower floors of a residential building”. The powerful blast had ripped out walls and doors, leaving piles of rubble on the ground. Mykhailo Vovchynskyi, who had just moved into the destroyed building, said that if the Russian deemed that to be a “high-precision attack, that is pretty cynical”. “It’s inhuman behaviour,” the 22-year-old told AFP. “I think Russians aren’t afraid of anything, not even the world’s judgement,” Anna Hromovych, deputy director of a heavily damaged clinic, told AFP as she and others were cleaning up the devastation on Friday.

“It is a war zone, but it is shocking that it happened close to us,” said Saviano Abreu, spokesman for the UN’s humanitarian office who was travelling with Guterres, adding that the delegation was safe. Guterres, who was in Kyiv after talks in Moscow with Putin, had called war “evil” after visiting Bucha and demanded the Kremlin cooperate with an International Criminal Court investigation into the accusations. Ukrainian prosecutors said they have pinpointed more than 8,000 alleged war crime cases and have opened investigations into 10 Russian soldiers for suspected atrocities in Bucha, where dozens of bodies in civilian clothes were found following Moscow’s retreat. Those cases involve “killing civilians, bombing of civilian infrastructure, torture” and “sexual crimes” reported during Russia’s occupation of various parts of Ukraine, prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova told a German broadcaster.