Two loud explosions sounded at dawn Friday in the center of Kiev, the day after the start of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. “Horrible Russian missile fire on Kiev. The last time our capital saw something like this was in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Ukraine has defeated this demon and will also defeat this one, ”denounced the head of diplomacy Dmytro Kouleba on Twitter. And in the process, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the death of at least 137 of his fellow citizens since the start of the Russian invasion Thursday morning.
“137 heroes, our citizens” lost their lives, he said in a video address posted on the presidency’s website, adding that 316 other people on the Ukrainian side were injured in the fighting.
The Ukrainian army, for its part, claimed to have shot down five planes and a helicopter of the Russian army and to have killed around fifty “Russian occupiers” in the east of the country.