The Ukrainian capital was the target of strikes Thursday night, the first since mid-April. Bombings taking place while UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is visiting the country.
The timing of attack questions. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres arrived in Ukraine on Wednesday and continued his visit to the war-torn country with Russia, strikes swept Kyiv.
The capital, spared by Moscow’s troops since mid-April, was bombed while Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Antonio Guterres held a press conference. BFMTV.com gets back to this breaking fact.
• Two strikes in a residential area
In Chevchenkovsky district, not far from the city center, which was hit on several levels, the bombings happened around 20:30 Ukrainian time.
Our teams, authorized to approach the bombed building, were able to take pictures of a burned-out building where debris was found on the ground, as well as the remains of a missile. In another building, located next to the first, the windows were shattered by the blast of the explosion. A large military force was deployed and aid was dispatched to the scene to evacuate the victims of this strike.
According to our journalists present at the scene, there is an armaments factory not far from the bombed building. These strikes hit the first floors of a new building near the factory.
“There it was most likely to hit the depot, which was nearby […]a military target nearby,” said Michel Goya, defense adviser to BFMTV.
• Several injured
Questioned by our journalists, an adviser to the Minister of the Interior gave the number of people injured in these bombings as six. A provisional balance sheet that affects civilians here.
“There were people under the rubble, we managed to get them out, give them first aid and evacuate them to the ambulances,” said Alexander, a member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense. In front of our camera, he tells us that “he got injured women and children out of the rubble. Thanks to us, they could be saved.”
“A fire broke out after enemy shelling of a 25-storey apartment building, the first and second floors of which were partially destroyed,” the Ukrainian rescue service said. “According to preliminary information, five people were rescued and ten injured,” it said on Facebook.
• Antonio Guterres ‘sure’ but ‘shocked’
A United Nations spokesman said in the evening that the UN delegation and its leader, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, were “safe”.
“It’s a war zone but it’s shocking that it happened near where we were,” Saviano Abreu wrote to reporters.
• Strikes aimed at “humiliating” the UN?
“It says a lot about Russia’s actual attitude towards international institutions, the efforts of the Russian leadership to humiliate the UN and everything the organization stands for,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video posted to his Telegram channel became.
For his part, BFMTV’s defense adviser Michel Goya urges that these bombings should not be “overinterpreted”.
Anaïs Crouts, Marion Delpierre and Julie Roeser with Hugues Garnier with AFP