, but at least five detonated around the busy Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv.
The Shahid-136s, supplied by Russia’s ally Iran, are cumbersome and unsophisticated, but still carry an 88-pound warhead, which can wreak immense damage. And at an estimated cost of $20,000 each, they are extremely cheap in comparison to Russia’s more high-tech but dwindling stockpile of cruise missiles. Ukrainian intelligence claims that Iran has supplied 2,400 of these drones to Russia. The Iranian government still flatly denies these claims, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Ukrainian military and police on the ground engaged the incoming UAVs with whatever small arms they had to hand — assault rifles, pistols and even shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. Dramatic footage captured by the Kyiv city police’s body cams showed patrolmen scrambling to engage these winged bombs, before taking cover as they detonated yards away from their position.
One of the relatives, Denis Koval, a market trader, had just left the building for work. He told Yahoo News his 74 year-old grandmother, who lived in the same building, was home when the Iranian drone attacked. When he heard of the attack he immediately rushed home, but found little left of his residence and his grandmother, Anna, was trapped under the rubble.
By mid-afternoon, Ukrainian authorities had confirmed that four people had been killed in the strikes, including a six-months pregnant woman, Victoria, and her husband, Bogdan, both 34.