KYIV: Russian shelling killed two people in southern Ukraine, regional authorities said Monday, after the country intercepted a swarm of Iranian-designed attack drones launched by Russia overnight.

The civilians were killed in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions that the Kremlin claimed to have annexed in late 2022, despite not fully controlling them.

Kherson governor Oleksandr Prokudin announced one person had been killed by Russian shelling and that a 72-year-old man had been wounded.

Four injured in Russian shelling of Kharkiv, Ukraine officials say

Kherson was recaptured by Ukrainian forces in late 2022, months after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, but the region and its largest city have been under persistent Russian attacks since.

Zaporizhzhia region head Ivan Fedorov said Russian forces shelled the village of Stepnogirsk, killing one man.

Ukraine said it had downed more than two dozen Russian drones overnight that targeted the west, centre and south of the country.

The governor of the southern Mykolaiv region said debris from one drone damaged a private residence and left one woman with burns.

Ukraine’s air force said air defence systems intercepted Iranian-style Shahed attack drones over the central Poltava region, the southern Odesa region on the Black Sea and the western Lviv region, bordering Poland.

Russia also fired an Iskander ballistic missile at the northeastern Kharkiv region, where Russian forces recently launched a ground offensive and captured several villages, the air force said.

Russian aerial attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure have forced providers to introduce rolling blackouts to limit consumption.

The energy ministry on Monday warned of fresh outages and said Ukraine had again imported electricity from neighbouring Romania, Slovakia and Poland.