An air-raid alert was declared for Kyiv and most of Ukraine just before noon on August 1, following a Russian drone strike that destroyed a college dormitory in Ukraine’s eastern city of Kharkiv.
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In Moscow, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the Russian capital repelled a Ukrainian drone attack but that one office tower was damaged, while one of the city’s main airports was briefly closed.
At least one person was wounded in the attack on Kharkiv, which Mayor Ihor Terekhov said targeted the city’s densely populated suburbs and involved at least three drones.
“One of the drones destroyed two floors of one of the dormitories,” Terekhov said.
Regional police chief Volodymyr Tymoshko told national television that one person was wounded. Kharkiv, which is close to the border with Russia, has been frequently targeted by Russian strikes.
But deputy regional Governor Yevhen Ivanov said it was the first time that Kharkiv was struck by drones and not by missiles, as before.
In Moscow, Sobyanin said early on August 1 that the city’s air defenses repelled multiple drones overnight.
“Several drones were downed by air-defense systems while attempting to reach Moscow. One hit the same tower in the city as last time,” Sobyanin wrote on Telegram, referring to the building that was struck in a previous drone attack over the weekend.
Sobyanin said the drone attack didn’t cause any casualties.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a message on Telegram that two drones had been shot down in suburbs west of the city center.
“Another one was hit by radio-electronic equipment and, having run out of control, crashed on the territory of the complex of nonresidential buildings at Moskva Citi,” the ministry said, referring to a business center in the capital.
The office building complex is the headquarters of a number of government agencies, including the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Digital Development and Communications, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
An official from the Ministry of Economic Development said the ministry’s employees were continuing to work remotely after the drone strikes while the damage to the building is being assessed.
Moscow’s Vnukovo international airport, one of the three major airports of the Russian capital, was briefly closed after the attack, TASS state news agency reported.
In the eastern region of Donetsk, two civilians were killed by Russian shelling over the past 24 hours, regional Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Telegram on August 1.
The previous day, six people, including a 10-year-old child, were killed and 22 others were wounded in a missile strike on a high-rise apartment building in the southern city of Kryviy Rih.
In the southern city of Kherson, one man was killed by Russian shelling.
In the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, two civilians were killed and at least 17 wounded by Russian missiles.
On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces have been engaged in heavy fighting along the entire front line, fighting more than 40 close-combat battles over the past day, the General Staff of Ukraine’s military said in its daily report on August 1.
The British Ministry of Defense, in its daily intelligence bulletin, reported “intense fighting” in southern Ukraine.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on August 1 that Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces, had visited Russian troops in Ukraine’s southern region of Zaporizhzhya.
The previous day, Deputy Ukrainian Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported advances in the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporizhzhya.
“We are gradually but surely moving [ahead] in the Berdyansk and Melitopol directions,” Malyar said on Telegram, adding, “Fighting continues in all directions of the counteroffensive.”
Malyar said that since the start of their counteroffensive in May, Ukrainian forces have liberated almost 205 square kilometers — out of which almost 13 square kilometers were recaptured during the past week.
The report could not be independently verified.
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