KYIV, Sept 14 – Ukraine said on Thursday it downed 17 out of 22 Russian drones attacking its territory overnight in the country’s south, centre and north.

“On the night of September 14, 2023, from 9 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., the Russian invaders attacked Ukraine with several groups of Shahed-136/131 type (drones) from three directions,” Ukraine’s air force said in a post on Telegram.

Having initially sought to pummel Ukrainian targets with missiles, Russia has this year increasingly turned to the Shahed, a cheap Iranian kamikaze drone which is more expendable and can confuse air defences with its smaller size and low speed.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office said a six-year-old boy was killed and four other people, including his 13-year-old brother, were wounded by Russian shelling in the village of Novodmytrivka in the Kherson region.

“Enemy shells hit a private house and its territory,” it said in a statement on Telegram.

Meanwhile, the Russian military destroyed Ukrainian five drone boats that were trying to attack a patrol ship in the Black Sea early on Thursday, Russian official media reported, citing the defence ministry.

The ministry said the unmanned boats were “destroyed by fire from the ship’s standard weapons” while repelling the attack on the Sergei Kotov about 5am.

On Wednesday the Russian military destroyed three Ukrainian unmanned boats in the Black Sea, it said.

Boris Johnson has attacked the UK government over its policy on Ukraine, saying it should urgently provide more weaponry requested by Kyiv and asking the west: “What the hell are we waiting for?”

The former prime minister, who formed a close relationship with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy after the outbreak of the war with Russia, called on the UK to provide howitzers, Storm Shadow cruise missiles and “as much help as we can give them with drone technology”.

Writing for the Spectator magazine, which he used to edit, Johnson said it could be a “relatively trivial outlay for extraordinary potential reward” if western nations were to provide more military support. He called for a “far greater sense of urgency about our programme of military assistance”.

He wrote:I have asked it before and I ask it again: what the hell are we waiting for?

Johnson said Ukrainians did not want warm words but “weaponry to finish the job – and so I simply do not understand why we keep dragging our feet”.