KYIV, Ukraine -- A Russian drone struck a school in Kyiv on Thursday, city officials said, as the Ukrainian capital endured another day of relentless aerial attacks. Children and staff at the school were in shelters when the drone hit, Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said, and its warhead didn’t explode. No casualties were reported, but the building’s brick facade showed a large hole, revealing a staircase, and burn marks alongside smashed windows. Kyiv has felt like a city under siege in recent weeks, with repeated air raid alerts, punctuated by loud explosions from drone and missile strikes. The onslaught aims to terrorize civilians, officials and analysts say, and break their will to resist 4 1/2 years after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The strain is showing. Maryna Lystopad, 35, said her hair has started falling out due to the stress from escalating attacks and never knowing where the next attack will hit. “It’s really horrible. I can’t take it anymore. I think, I think that soon we’re all going to leave. I’m really not doing well,” she told The Associated Press. “I’m constantly anxious. I can’t relax. I keep thinking that if something happens, if something hits, one of my relatives could be killed.” Lystopad said she recently had to travel to another part of Kyiv and had been “genuinely stressed” the whole way there. “I kept checking, like, whether anything was flying in, where it was going, where am I supposed to go? Where am I supposed to run?” she said. Ukraine’s air defences are stretched The front line in eastern and southern Ukraine hasn’t seen major shifts since last year, but the country is struggling to fend off Russia’s intensified aerial attacks on cities that include ballistic missiles and high-flying jet-powered drones. Reflecting the urgency of Ukraine’s plight, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he held a conference call Thursday with senior military and government officials in charge of protecting infrastructure, as some areas fall behind on implementing previously agreed measures. He said the Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry will review agreements Ukraine has made with partner countries on supplying ammunition for air defences and F-16 fighter jets, with an updated schedule of deliveries to be presented within 24 hours. “It is important that we have additional missiles in October,” Zelenskyy said on social media. In response to Russia’s attacks, Ukraine has fired its long-range drones at manufacturing plants deep inside Russia and has targeted Russia’s drone launch sites. Zelenskyy said Thursday that Kyiv’s forces struck a site in Russia’s southwestern Oryol region that is used to store and launch attack drones. Ukraine also has repeatedly attacked Russia’s oil refineries from Moscow to Siberia, sparking a widespread fuel crisis. President Vladimir Putin said in a rare admission Thursday that because of these strikes, “according to our estimates, we lost around one per cent” of gross domestic product. “They started attacking oil refineries and openly declared the goal of damaging our economy. Did they achieve their goal? Partially,” Putin said at a meeting of the Valdai Club forum of international foreign policy experts. Separately, Zelenskyy said Ukraine had deployed its domestically developed short-range FP-7 ballistic missile in combat for the first time, without elaborating on when or where the mission took place. Accompanying the post was an image of a missile being launched, and he said the next stage would be to scale up production. The Associated Press was not able to verify the claim independently. To turn the tide, Ukraine needs U.S.-made Patriot missiles that can effectively defend against ballistic missiles, but they are in short supply since the Iran war began. A plan to produce them inside Ukraine could take years to bear fruit. Kyiv is racing to produce interceptors that can bring down fast-moving jet-propelled drones as the swift cycle of military innovation during the war continues. Sanctions are key to stopping Russia, Ukraine says Ukraine wants tougher sanctions imposed on Russia to prevent it from getting key high-tech components for its arsenal. Britain on Thursday imposed sanctions on 31 Russian individuals, entities and ships it says are linked to disinformation, attempts to avoid energy sanctions and the mistreatment of Ukrainian civilians in areas seized in the war by Russia. Moscow, meanwhile, is pressing its advantage before Ukraine comes up with an answer to the latest challenges. Two Russian drones hit an important bridge across the Dnipro River in Kyiv on Thursday, Klitschko said, with traffic suspended until a safety inspection could be done. Also, the Parkovyi data centre in Kyiv, which provides cloud services and server hosting, was critically damaged and has stopped operating following repeated Russian strikes, the company said. Client data has been moved to backup sites in the European Union, it said on Facebook. Russia steps up a campaign against Ukraine’s power grid Ukrainian officials didn’t report any energy infrastructure being hit Thursday, a day after what officials said was the biggest Russian attack on the power grid since spring. Wednesday’s barrage marked “the beginning of Russia’s strike campaign aimed at degrading Ukraine’s energy security ahead of winter … and forcing Ukraine to capitulate,” said the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. Russia is expected to step up attacks on the electricity supply as the weather gets colder. It was 19 C (66 F) in Kyiv on Thursday, and mild temperatures were set to continue. In a surprise development, Russia for the first time on Wednesday used a jet-powered drone fitted with a warhead designed to sever high-voltage pylons, said Serhii Beskrestnov, an advisor to Zelenskyy on defence technology. AP reporter Volodymr Yurchuk in Kyiv contributed.
