A school, a bridge and a nuclear research facility — Moscow's drone campaign keeps escalating, with September bringing more strikes than August.
The bell didn't ring at one Kyiv school this morning — a Russian drone hit it first.
Children and staff were already in shelters when the strike landed on Thursday, and Mayor Vitali Klitschko said there were no immediate reports of casualties. It was one of the latest blows in a drone campaign that keeps getting heavier: elsewhere in the capital, two Russian drones struck a bridge linking eastern and western Kyiv, forcing the suspension of metro and ground public transport.
The day before, a drone hit the grounds of a nuclear research facility in Kyiv and started a fire. Ukraine's nuclear safety watchdog said the blaze was quickly put out, no one was hurt, and the facility's test reactor — shut down since 2022 — was not damaged.
The figures show the escalation. Ukraine's air force says Russia carried out 3,177 drone strikes in September, up from 2,850 in August. And the war keeps crossing borders: in Russia's Belgorod region, local authorities said one man was killed on Thursday when a drone exploded in the town of Graivoron.
Thursday also brought new sanctions from London: 31 measures aimed at cutting funding to what the Foreign Office called the "Kremlin war chest, propagandists and torturers" — including eight people accused of arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment of Ukrainian civilians, and seven accused of indoctrinating and militarising Ukrainian children. The UK says it seeks no confrontation with Russia but will stand by Ukraine until the end of what it called a "barbaric" war.
