Russian attack on Kyiv kills two, injures four; drone hits empty school

Kyiv's city military administration said two people were killed and four injured in a wave of Russian drone and missile strikes on the capital on Thursday, in which a residential block, a warehouse and a school were hit.

A Russian Shahed drone struck a school building in the Solomianskyi district early in the day, sparking a fire, but caused no injuries because pupils and staff were sheltering during an air-raid alert, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. More than 100 pupils and about 60 staff were in the school's shelter at the time, Kyiv police said, and firefighters later put out the blaze that damaged the four storey building's facade.

Two more drones hit near the supports of the city's Southern Bridge around midday, disrupting a key metro and road crossing between the capital's east and west banks, Klitschko said. Traffic across the bridge was halted while engineers inspected the structure, though cars and a metro train had continued crossing as the strike happened.

Police said the overnight assault hit 11 locations in Kyiv in all, including the Solomianskyi, Obolonskyi and Pecherskyi districts, with fires also breaking out at a residential building, a warehouse and parked cars. Air-raid alerts sounded six times in the capital by 12:30 local time, with explosions heard across several districts, including the central Pecherskyi district.

The capital endured one of its longest alerts of the war on 30 September, lasting 12 hours and 44 minutes as part of nearly 21 hours of warnings that day. Earlier on Thursday, one person was wounded in a separate Russian strike on a business centre in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, regional officials said, and city administration chief Serhiy Lysak said infrastructure had been damaged there.

Ukraine's education minister, named in a social media post as Butenko, wrote on Telegram that the strike on the school was "cynical terror," saying schools, kindergartens, colleges and universities have become one of Russia's recurring targets, with an education site hit almost daily in recent weeks. Interfax-Ukraina reported at least four other education sites hit this month, including a 28 September strike on the National Academy of Sciences' Kyiv headquarters that killed two people.