New Delhi: Russia struck the headquarters of Ukraine’s largest mobile operator Kyivstar in Kyiv on Sunday, damaging the company’s building amid a wider series of attacks on Ukrainian communications and data infrastructure. No Kyivstar employees were injured in the strike, according to the company.
Kyivstar’s head office is located on Degtyarivska Street in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district. The site has been targeted previously, with a drone strike on September 11 destroying an office used by the company’s engineering team at the same location.
Kyivstar told Interfax-Ukraine that its head office was damaged in Sunday’s strike and that none of its employees were injured. Another building housing Kyivstar equipment in the Kyiv region was attacked on September 17, adding to a series of recent strikes affecting the company’s infrastructure.
The latest attack comes as Russian strikes have increasingly affected Ukraine’s communications and internet infrastructure. According to Ukraine’s digital ministry, attacks on data centres belonging to Ukrainian internet providers over the past week caused service outages affecting about 100,000 households in Kyiv and the surrounding region, Reuters reported.
The Russia’s defence ministry said its forces struck a target in Kyiv overnight, damaging a data processing centre belonging to Vodafone Ukraine, Interfax reported. The ministry said the facility provides mobile communications and high-speed internet services to the Ukrainian armed forces, including for the transmission of intelligence data.
The Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, has described the country’s data centres as critical civilian infrastructure, saying they are important for keeping information and emergency alerts available to the public. In a statement, he said rapid warnings about missile and drone threats were essential for saving lives and argued that such infrastructure was not a “military target”.
In a new update, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Russia had used 277 attack drones against Ukraine since the previous day, including 155 jet-powered drones. He said that in Kyiv alone, the attacks damaged two kindergartens, two schools, a residential building, an auto repair shop, several warehouses and communications facilities.
Zelenskyy also said a building used as the residence of the Saudi Arabian ambassador was among the damaged sites. He reported damage to a sports school in the Dnipropetrovsk region and a regional children’s home in Sumy and said the wider attacks had killed people and injured dozens.
Zelenskyy also said new sanctions packages were being prepared against financial networks, supply chains and companies and individuals involved in the production of Russian weapons. He said the measures were expected to take effect in October and called for stronger pressure on Moscow from Ukraine’s international partners.