Russian drone attack kills two, injures 15 in Ukraine’s Odesa

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KYIV (Reuters) -Russian drones attacked Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa early on Thursday, killing two people and injuring 15 more, in addition to sparking fires and damaging infrastructure, emergency services said.

“The enemy attack damaged residential high-rises, private houses, a supermarket, a school, and cars,” regional governor Oleh Kiper wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “Fires broke out in some places and are being extinguished by our rescuers.”

Ukraine’s state-owned railway Ukrzaliznytsia said the overnight attack also damaged its tracks, the contact network and three freight cars.

“Railway employees are carrying out rapid repair work to ensure that freight trains run to ports without interruption. They are currently following an alternative route.”

Passenger trains were running on schedule, it added on Telegram. One of the people killed in his home during the attack on Odesa was a railway worker, according to the company.

Ukraine’s air force said that Russia launched five ballistic missiles and 170 drones during the overnight attack.

The air force shot down 74 drones while another 68 drones did not reach their targets likely due to electronic warfare countermeasures, it said.

It did not specify what happened to the missiles or remaining 28 drones.

Videos posted by Kiper showed heavily damaged facade of a high-rise building, a storefront with shattered windows and fire-fighters battling flames at one of the sites in the city.

In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city in the northeast, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said a drone had struck a petrol station in the city centre, sparking a fire.

(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Anastasiia Malenko in Kyiv; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Toby Chopra)