Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday, July 31, urged his allies to bring about “regime change” in Russia, hours after a Russian drone and missile attack on Kyiv killed 16 people, including a six-year-old boy, and wounded at least 150 others, authorities said. The overnight strikes reduced part of a nine-story apartment block in Kyiv’s western suburbs to rubble.
The Russian army, meanwhile, claimed to have captured Chasiv Yar, a strategically important hillside town in eastern Ukraine where the two sides have been fiercely fighting for months. Moscow has stepped up its deadly aerial assaults on Ukraine in recent months, resisting US pressure to end its nearly three-and-a-half-year invasion as its forces grind forward on the battlefield.
Speaking virtually to a conference marking 50 years since the signing of the Cold War-era Helsinki Accords, Zelensky said he believed Russia could be “pushed” to stop the war.
“But if the world doesn’t aim to change the regime in Russia, that means even after the war ends, Moscow will still try to destabilize neighboring countries,” he said.
‘Unimaginable scale of terror’
From late Wednesday to early Thursday, Russia fired over 300 drones and eight cruise missiles at Ukraine, with Kyiv the main target, the Ukrainian Air Force said. One missile tore through a nine-story residential building in the west of the capital, tearing off its facade, authorities said.
AFP journalists at the scene saw rescuers scouring through a smoldering mound of broken concrete, the belongings of residents scattered among the debris.
Among the victims was a six-year-old boy who died on the way to the hospital, the head of the city’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, posted on Telegram.
Zelensky said late Thursday that over 150 people had been injured, “including 16 children and six policemen,” denouncing an “unimaginable scale of terror and brutality” from the Russian strikes. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said Friday had been declared a day of mourning in the capital for the victims.
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The Russian army said it had hit a military airfield, ammunition warehouse and drone production facilities with a combined overnight strike using weaponry and drones. The attack came just days after US President Donald Trump issued a 10-day ultimatum for Moscow to halt its invasion, now in its fourth year, or face sanctions.
Trump on Thursday blasted Russia’s actions in Ukraine, suggesting that new sanctions against Moscow were coming. “Russia – I think it’s disgusting what they’re doing. I think it’s disgusting,” Trump told journalists.
“We’re going to put sanctions,” he said, before specificially referring to Putin: “I don’t know that sanctions bother him.”
