Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said at least one person was killed and eight wounded after a series of explosions in the capital. Reuters correspondents said that 10 explosions were heard in the city.

The mayor said that one of the injured was a Japanese journalist and that he had been taken to a hospital.

The city administration said a hotel just south of Kyiv city center was bombed and a residential building in another area was damaged.

The governor of the Kyiv region, Oleksiy Kuleba, warned shortly before the explosions of an imminent missile attack, and said that air defenses in the region were dealing with targets.

After the explosions shook the capital, Kuleba wrote in another post on the Telegram application, "The terrorist country fired several showers of missiles at us. This is their congratulations to us for the new year. But we will persevere."

Explosions across the country

Other cities across Ukraine were also bombed. Vitaly Kem, governor of the southern Mykolaiv region, said on television that six people were injured in the area.

In a separate post on Telegram, Kim said Russia had targeted civilians with strikes, something Moscow had previously denied.

"According to today's trends, the occupiers are not only striking vital (infrastructure) ... In many cities, (they are targeting) simply residential areas, hotels, garages and roads," he added.

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, aide to Ukraine's president, said two people were wounded in the drone attack in the western city of Khmelnytskyi.

He added that a strike targeted the city of Zaporizhia in the south of the country and damaged residential buildings.

Ukraine's Defense Ministry responded with a defiant message posted on Telegram.

"With each new missile attack on civilian infrastructure, more and more Ukrainians are convinced of the need to fight until the complete collapse of the Putin regime," she said.

(Prepared by Marwa Salam and Muhammad Ali Farag for the Arabic Bulletin - Edited by Duaa Muhammad)