KYIV: A Russian drone attack Friday on Ukraine's port town of Izmail killed three, while a strike on a police office in the central city of Krivyi Rig killed one, officials said. Two elderly women and a 73-year-old man were killed in Izmail, a strategic port on the River Danube, and 11 were wounded including one child, Odesa regional governor Oleg Kiper said in a statement. "Private and apartment buildings, outbuildings, buildings and cars were damaged," he wrote, adding that several fires broke out but were quickly extinguished.
While far from the front, the southwestern city of Izmail and nearby areas are often targeted by Russian forces trying to disrupt port infrastructure crucial for Ukraine's shipping.
Romania's defence ministry said it scrambled four jets after detecting the approaching drones, adding that one drone might have entered its airspace for "less than three minutes". "According to the data available at the moment, there was no reported impact zone on national territory," it said.
On Friday morning in the central city of Krivyi Rig, a missile attack on a police office killed one woman and wounded five, regional governor Sergiy Lysak said. A missile gutted a police district headquarters in the city and "a woman's body was found under the rubble of the administrative building", Lysak said, with search operations still ongoing. The strike caused damage to 23 private houses and three multi-storey blocks of flats and an educational facility, the governor said. An overnight missile attack also struck the central-eastern city of Dnipro, damaging an "industrial facility" but without causing injuries, Lysak said.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky will sit down for a potentially fractious meeting Friday, following a series of scathing attacks by the White House hopeful on the Ukrainian president's handling of the conflict with Russia.
US media had earlier reported the meeting would not go ahead after Trump was offended by Zelensky's comments to The New Yorker magazine, in which he said that the Republican "doesn't really know how to stop the war."
The Ukrainian leader presented a so-called "victory" plan to Biden and Harris at the White House on Thursday, with Biden announcing a new military aid package worth nearly $8 billion for Kyiv.
Standing with Zelensky at her side, Harris did not mention Trump by name but said there were "some in my country who would instead force Ukraine to give up large parts of its sovereign territory."
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