A drone attack on Ukraine's Kiev region overnight injured a 19-year-old Ukrainian woman in the head and set fire to an apartment building, Reuters reported, citing local authorities.
The information is from the early hours of this morning, according to a post on the Telegram app by the acting head of the Kiev regional military administration, Mykola Kalashnik.
"She has been hospitalized with a head wound," Kalashnik said of the victim. He also published a photo of firefighters trying to put out a fire in an apartment building.
Reuters makes the reservation that this information cannot be independently verified, but reports that the agency's employees on the ground heard explosions in the territory of Kiev and its outskirts, with the rumble reminiscent of air defense operations.
The mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, in turn wrote on "Telegram" that an air raid was being carried out against the capital.
Air raid sirens went off in various parts of Ukraine last night at 10:00 p.m. local time (also Bulgarian), Reuters points out.
Activists from the Russian human rights organization "Memorial", which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, have visited Ukraine to investigate alleged human rights violations by Russian forces on the ground, DPA reported, quoted by BTA, citing a statement by the group's co-founder Oleg Orlov.
Orlov said the trip was organized together with Ukrainian human rights activists from the city of Kharkiv. This is one of the first publicly announced contacts between civil societies of Ukraine and Russia after more than three years of war, DPA notes.
"This trip was very important for me," said Orlov, who was released from a Russian prison last summer after spending several months behind bars for protesting the war in Ukraine. He now lives in exile in the German capital, Berlin.
In January, members of the group "Memorial" visited the Kiev, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Odessa, Mykolaiv and Kherson regions and spoke with victims of alleged Russian human rights abuses, Orlov said. "It was difficult for them to talk to us. But they talked", he said, describing the reactions of Ukrainians.
"The devastation caused by Russia is reminiscent of the cases in Syria and (the Russian republic of) Chechnya. The stories of shelling of civilian infrastructure, illegal detentions, torture and secret prisons sound familiar to human rights activists from other Russian wars," Orlov stressed. "The ruins of Mariupol were preceded by the ruins of Aleppo (in Syria) and Grozny in Chechnya," the Russian dissident said.
"In the occupied territories, the Russian state power rules with a system of state terror," said Vladimir Malikin, also part of the human rights organization "Memorial". The violence is deliberate and systematic, he stressed. In the event of a possible peace agreement, it is essential that both sides release all prisoners, Malikin added.
Ukraine currently bans Russian citizens from entering the country because of the war. However, the Ukrainian authorities have made an exception for members of the "Memorial" group, stressed Yevgeny Zakharov, head of a human rights group in the city of Kharkiv, who accompanied the Russian activists.