KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces launched 45 drones over Ukraine Sunday in a five-and-a-half-hour barrage, officials said, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued the reshuffle of his war cabinet as the war enters its third year.
In a statement, the Ukrainian air force said it had shot down 40 of the Iranian-made Shahed drones over nine different regions, including on the outskirts of the country’s capital, Kyiv.
The five-and-a-half-hour attack targeted agricultural facilities and coastal infrastructure, officials for Ukraine’s southern defense forces wrote on Telegram. They said that a strike in the Mykolaiv region had injured one person, sparking a fire and damaging nearby residential buildings.
Another person was injured in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region when a blaze broke out due to falling debris from a destroyed drone, said the head of the region’s military administration, Serhiy Lysak. Border police in Moldova also said Sunday that fragments of a “Shahed-type drone” were found near the southern town of Etulia close to the border with Ukraine, but that the debris posed no danger to communities nearby. “There is a suspicion that the detected drone debris is one of the drones shot down by the Ukrainian anti-aircraft system,” the border police said in a statement, referencing overnight attacks launched on Friday by Russian forces on Ukraine’s Izmail region. The distance between…