Canadian, Spanish aid workers killed in Ukraine

KYIV: Two aid workers, one Canadian and one Spanish, were killed in east Ukraine, said Kyiv on Sunday blaming Russian forces and calling their deaths near war-ravaged Bakhmut “a painful, irreparable loss”.

The defence ministry said Moscow’s troops had killed Emma Igual, a Spanish citizen who studied at the University of California at Berkeley, and Anthony Ihnat, a Canadian citizen both working for the NGO Road to Relief.

It said in a statement that two volunteers working for the aid group had been injured in the incident in the eastern Donetsk region. The industrial region has suffered the worst of the fighting of Russia’s invasion launched last February and Moscow claimed to have annexed the territory last year.

Kyiv said the aid workers had dedicated themselves to limiting the harm to civilians caught in the conflict, including by carrying out evacuations and distributing humanitarian relief.

Kyiv claims fending off new wave of drone attacks

Road to Relief said in a post on its Instagram account that the vehicle the four aid workers were travelling in “came under Russian attack” in Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine on Saturday morning. In “a direct hit, the vehicle flipped over and (caught) fire,” it said. The aid workers had left from Slovyansk and were headed to Bakhmut to assess the needs of civilians “caught in crossfire” in the town of Ivanivske.

“All necessary information is currently being gathered, and we are cooperating with both military and police to resolve all matters of concern,” the NGO said.

Igual, 32, was the director of Road to Relief, which she co-founded with a Frenchman, Henri Camenen, in March 2022, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine. According to Spanish media, she grew up in Barcelona.

In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle published in July, she said her Jewish grandmother escaped the Holocaust in Austria as a teenager and was adopted by a family in Spain after she lost her whole family in concentration camps.

“I grew up with that background, feeling what it must have been like to be a refugee or to be an orphan, so I felt determined to help people in a similar situation to her,” she told the newspaper.

Ukraine said on Sunday it had shot down most of the three dozen drones Russia launched overnight at the Kyiv region. The latest attack came as Ukraine’s forces were calling for more Western support for their counter-offensive to gain back land in the east and south.

“We recorded the launch of 33 Shahed (drones) in the direction of Kyiv, 26 were destroyed,” the Ukrainian Air Force said. A journalist in the Ukrainian capital heard multiple explosions — presumably from air defence — starting around 1:30am.

“Drones entered the capital in groups and from different directions,” Sergiy Popko, head of the Kyiv City Military Administration, wrote on Telegram. More than a hundred homes were damaged by falling debris, Kravchenko added. Ukrainian emergency services published photos of rescuers putting out fires in several districts.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said a resident suffered an “acute stress attack” and was receiving medical assistance after debris fell in the central Podil district.

Kyiv witnessed drone and missile attacks almost every night this winter and spring, as Russia pounded cities across Ukraine in a bid to wipe out Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and destroy morale.