Ex-Russian lawmaker says he was hurt in Russian drone attack outside Kyiv

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine said on Thursday it had repelled a Russian drone attack on the region outside Kyiv overnight, but that debris injured two people, one of whom was identified by media reports as a onetime Russian lawmaker turned Kremlin critic.

Ilya Ponomaryov, who has lived in Ukraine for years and has Ukrainian citizenship, later wrote on Facebook that a drone exploded outside his front door, inflicting shrapnel wounds and causing a fire.

He published a photograph of himself looking into a camera, his face and upper chest spattered with blood.

Kyiv’s regional authorities said the drone strike was the second on the area in as many nights. Two privately-held residential buildings were damaged, but there were no direct hits to residential or critical infrastructure, it said.

The air force said it had shot down all seven Shahed-type drones used for the attack. Ponomaryov portrayed the attack as a deliberate Russian attack on him, an interpretation that clashed with the air force’s account that the drones were shot down.

On Wednesday, Ukraine said Russia used 87 drones in one of its largest such attacks since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The governor of the central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region said the air force had also shot down one drone there and no casualties were reported.

Russia also launched Iskander-M ballistic missiles at the battered northeastern region of Kharkiv overnight, injuring one more person, its governor said.

Ukraine’s national railways Ukrzaliznytsia said the Russian missile attack on the region damaged its tracks and power supply facilities, in addition to two locomotives, freight and passenger cars.

(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko; editing by Tom Balmforth, Miral Fahmy and Deepa Babington)