Sawt Falasteen - Russian strikes kill 5 in east Ukraine, journalist killed near Kyiv

The large-scale Russian drone barrage overnight killed two people near Kyiv, including a Ukrainian journalist, her news agency said.

AFP journalists in Kyiv heard explosions ringing out after the Ukrainian air force said Russia fired a barrage of 177 drones of various types at targets across the country.

Russian forces have been clawing their way towards the town of Kostyantynivka and intensively bombarding the civilian hub in the eastern Donetsk region, which the Kremlin claims is part of Russia.

"At least five people were killed and eight were wounded in the strikes on Kostyantynivka," the governor of the Donetsk region Vadim Filashkin wrote on social media.

The strikes attest to the increasingly difficult fighting for Ukrainian forces that are facing down a better-resourced and large Russian army across the sprawling front line.

The attack on Kostyantynivka, which had an estimated pre-war population of around 67,000 people, came after Russia launched dozens of drones overnight in an aerial assault that damaged Ukrainian energy facilities and killed two people near the Ukrainian capital.

The Ukrinform news agency announced Wednesday afternoon that its journalist Tetiana Kulyk was among those killed in the attack.

"Her untimely death has shocked her colleagues and is a huge loss for the agency," the agency said in a statement.

- Energy facilities damaged -

The university where Kulyk's husband worked said it was likely that he was at home with her at the time of the strike, and authorities said they had found a second body.

The interior ministry said separately that two people were wounded in the second-largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and that one drone hit a nine-storey residential building.

And Ukraine's largest private energy company, DTEK, said one of its facilities had been damaged in the Dnipropetrovsk region, without elaborating.

The drone attacks by both sides have become a deadly, daily reality of a war now into its fourth year, as the United States pushes Ukraine and Russia towards a halt to fighting.

Russia's defence ministry said it had shot down 128 Ukrainian drones overnight over Russian regions and annexed Crimea, in one of the largest Ukrainian attacks since the start of the war in February 2022.

Kyiv has stepped up air strikes against energy and military facilities on Russian territory in recent months, in response to Moscow's bombardment of its cities and energy infrastructure.

Air defence forces "intercepted and destroyed 128 Ukrainian aerial drones" including 30 over the Crimean peninsula annexed in 2014, the Russian defence ministry said.

In addition to the Krasnodar region, known for its Black Sea resorts, drone attacks also targeted the Russian regions of Bryansk and Kursk, which border Ukraine, according to the ministry.

No major damage was immediately reported by Russian media or authorities.

But Andriy Kovalenko, an official responsible for countering disinformation on the Ukrainian security council, said there was an attack on the Russian port of Tuapse.

Kovalenko said the town was a key Russian cargo port that has one of the country's largest oil terminals.

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F.AbuZaid--SF-PST