Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko accused Russia of pointing a “middle finger” at the United Nations after the Ukrainian capital was attacked by a Russian rocket barrage during U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s visit to the city.
On April 28, Russian artillery missiles struck an apartment complex in Kyiv as well as another commercial building. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded broadcaster that broadcasts across Eastern Europe to preserve the free flow of information, said that one of its broadcasters, Vira Hyrych, was killed in the attack. Ten others were wounded, while one lost a leg.
The missile strike occurred while Guterres was visiting the capital and meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other dignitaries. His visit, shortly after visiting Moscow, was intended broker a deal for the evacuation of civilians from Mariupol – a city along Ukraine’s eastern coast that has been under Russian military bombardment for the last two months. According to Ukrainian authorities, over 100,000 people remain trapped in the city. Guterres was reportedly at Ukraine’s parliament, in the center of the city, at the time of the strike on Kyiv.
Putin gave his “his middle finger” to Guterres, said Klitschko after the attack. Zelensky claimed the incident “says a lot about Russia’s true attitude toward global institutions, about attempts of the Russian leadership to humiliate the U.N. and everything the organization represents.”
Russia’s defense ministry had claimed that it struck “production buildings” for armaments in a press release on Friday. It did not mention those wounded.
The attack was notable not only for having occurred during Guterres’s visit, but also for its disruption of a relative period of calm in Kyiv. Russian forces, last week, retreated from the city’s outskirts to Eastern Ukraine to begin a “second phase” of the war.