KYIV (Reuters) -A Russian drone attack killed at least two people and injured 19 in the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy on Monday, prompting President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to call for a major upgrade of anti-aircraft defences.
An official building and two residential buildings were damaged in an attack carried out with four drones, the Sumy regional administration said on the messaging app Telegram.
Images posted by Ukraine’s state emergency service showed mangled buildings and courtyards scattered with debris as rescue workers tackled a fire.
“Unfortunately, our country does not yet have a sufficient number of high-quality air defence systems to protect our entire territory and shoot down all enemy targets,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
“We will do everything possible and impossible to make our air defences the strongest.”
Ukraine, he said, needed to protect its own territory and “in future become the basis of a European air shield. This is absolutely necessary and absolutely possible.”
He said Ukrainian air defences had downed more than 3,000 targets of various types over the 16 months of war.
Another air-raid alert was declared in the Sumy region several hours after the morning strike.
Kyiv’s military had earlier on Monday reported shooting down 13 of 17 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched by Moscow overnight in a separate attack on several parts of the country.
Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has stepped up air strikes against Ukraine in recent weeks, and Ukraine has launched a counteroffensive to try to retake occupied territory.
(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk, Editing by Timothy Heritage, Andrew Heavens and Ron Popeski)
