Russian drones kill woman, 9-year-old son at home as Ukrainian civilian casualties surge

Kyiv: Russian jet-powered drones struck a home in northern Ukraine on Friday, killing a 29-year-old woman and her 9-year-old son, officials said.

The strike came a day after the United Nations said July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since the weeks following Moscow's all-out invasion of its neighbour more than four years ago.

At least 437 civilians were killed and 2,610 wounded last month, the UN monitoring mission in Kyiv said, as Russia escalated its bombing of Ukrainian towns and cities. That was 70 per cent higher than in July last year and 30 per cent up on June of this year.


Overall, since Russia's invasion on Feb 24, 2022, UN human rights monitors say the war has killed at least 16,874 civilians, including 820 children, and wounded 51,273, including 3,126 children.

"Every month this year the number of killed and injured civilians has increased. That trend accelerated sharply in July," said Danielle Bell, head of the UN human rights monitoring mission in Kyiv. "The number of civilian casualties in July was the highest we documented in a single month since March 2022."

The Russian strike in northern Ukraine's Sumy region early Friday also wounded four other people, including the dead boy's father and grandmother, who were hospitalised with severe burns, the regional military administration chief Oleh Hryhorov said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that Moscow is planning to escalate its strikes on Ukraine, even as US diplomatic efforts to end the war are set to continue.

"We will use much harsher methods to destroy everything that feeds Kyiv's war machine from the West," Lavrov said in an interview with Russian state TV broadcast Friday, referring to military aid Kyiv receives from abroad.

Officials in Washington said last month that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's main envoys, would travel to Kyiv sometime in the future. No date for the trip is publicly known, as the US focuses on the Iran war.

Zelenskyy has accepted an unconditional ceasefire demanded by Trump, but Putin has refused, demanding a comprehensive peace agreement first, and Lavrov said that position hasn't changed.

"We will only stop when there's a long-term, reliable and sustainable settlement," he said.

In Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, a Russian glide bomb demolished six floors of a 10-story apartment block, killing one person and wounding 16 others, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Russia is launching around 220 glide bombs every day against settlements near the front line in eastern and southern Ukraine, Zelenskyy said in a social media post Friday.

Russian forces crush settlements with the brute force of 1,300 kg glide bombs, artillery, missiles and drones, then send in infantry units to attack the exposed defenders. The tactic has rendered many towns and villages uninhabitable.

In addition, Russian forces struck two tugboats in the Black Sea that were escorting cargo ships carrying Western weapons for Ukraine, the Defence Ministry in Moscow said.

It also said that its drones overnight hit Ukraine's southern Izmail port's railway station which it said is used for transporting military cargo and fuel for the Ukrainian armed forces.

In all, Russia attacked 12 Ukrainian regions overnight, wounding dozens of people, Zelenskyy said.

Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, extended their long-range strike campaign against Russian infrastructure, hitting the port of Ust-Luga in the Leningrad region north of Moscow and starting a brief fire, its governor Alexander Drozdenko said.

Ust-Luga is one of Russia's largest oil and gas export terminals located more than 800 km from Ukraine.

It has been a frequent target of Ukrainian drone attacks this summer, as Kyiv seeks to undermine Russian oil exports that provide Moscow with vital revenue for its war effort.

Ukraine also launched another attack on the premises of Wildberries, Russia's biggest online retailer, which Kyiv says helps supply the Russian military.

The attack damaged a wall of a Wildberries warehouse in the Tver region north of Moscow, the region's acting governor, Vitaly Korolyov, said.

Wildberries reported "insignificant damage" and said the goods stored at the site were not damaged.

The Russian Defence Ministry said Friday its air defences overnight intercepted 553 Ukrainian drones over 18 Russian regions, as well as occupied Crimea and the waters of the Azov and the Black seas.

NATO fighter jets shot down a drone that entered Latvian airspace in the early hours of Friday, the Latvian army and an official for the military alliance said.

Latvian authorities did not say what the origin of the drone was, but said it had entered Latvia "as a result of Russian electromagnetic warfare".

Several drones have previously crossed the border into Latvia. Most of them are thought to be Ukrainian drones that strayed off course due to Russian electronic jamming.

Two Italian Eurofighter jets were scrambled to tackle the drone and one of them shot it down, NATO spokesperson Allison Hart said.

Two Turkish fighter jets were also deployed, she said.

Residents in five municipalities in eastern Latvia were warned about the threat to airspace and told to take shelter.

Also, a drone crashed in woodland in Romania 5 km from the border with Ukraine, the NATO member's Defence Ministry said Friday.

Military radars did not detect the drone, which landed in eastern Tulcea County, because it was flying at a "very low" altitude, the ministry said. It provided no details about the drone's origin.