WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Nine killed in Kyiv in intense Russian air attack

At least nine people have been killed and several injured in an overnight Russian missile and drone attack in the Kyiv region, the interior minister has said.

In a post on social media, Ihor Klymenko said residential areas, hospitals and sports infrastructure had been hit.

At least six of those killed were in a high-rise building in the capital, Kyiv's mayor Vitali Klitschko said. The city's military administration said a further 33 people had been injured.

In the latest barrage, 352 Russian drones and 16 missiles targeted Ukrainian territory, mostly in the Kyiv area, the Ukrainian air force said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky is travelling to London on Monday for talks with PM Keir Starmer on UK military support for Ukraine.

One Kyiv resident, Valeriy Mankuta, 33, said he "woke up in the rubble" after his building was hit by what authorities said was a missile. He escaped his apartment by climbing out of the window.

"There were bricks on me, there was something in my mouth. It was total hell," he told Reuters news agency.

Another resident, Natalia Marshavska, described hearing a drone buzzing above her apartment before it exploded. The force of the blast threw her across the room, shattering the windows, she told AFP news agency.

Smoke began billowing everywhere, she said, adding: "It was horrible."

Russia has intensified its air attacks against Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, sending large waves of missiles, drones and decoys designed to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences.

It is a tactic that Ukrainian forces are struggling to defend against.

Many thousands of Kyiv residents were forced into the shelters in the early hours of Monday morning as drones flew overhead and explosions shook the city.

Ukraine's emergencies service shared footage showing shocked residents being led away from a destroyed high-rise building that was still burning.

The entrance to one of Kyiv's metro stations - where people regularly take shelter - was damaged, and classrooms and dormitories at one of the city's universities were also hit.

Separately, one person reportedly died after a drone struck a hospital in the city of Bila Tserkva just outside the capital.

On Monday, an attack on the southern Odesa region killed two people and wounded a dozen more, local authorities said.

Zelensky said a school in the area was hit and almost completely destroyed.

"None of these Russian strikes are accidental - the Russian army knows exactly where it is targeting," he posted on X.

Speaking to reporters this week in the capital, Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky vowed to step up Ukrainian strikes on Russia.

"We will not just sit in defence because this brings nothing and eventually leads to the fact that we still retreat, lose people and territories," he said.

It comes as the capital is still reeling from overnight Russian attacks on Tuesday which left at least 28 people dead and more than 100 injured.

The attack was among the biggest on the capital since the start of Russia's full-scale war which began in February 2022.

Diplomatic efforts to end the three-year war have stalled. The last direct talks between the two sides finished almost three weeks ago with agreement only on limited exchanges of prisoners and the bodies of the dead.

No new talks have been scheduled.

Zelensky had been due to meet Donald Trump on the side lines of the G7 conference last week, but the meeting was cancelled after Trump left the conference early amid the escalating crisis in the Middle East.

The Ukrainian leader is due to attend a dinner during a Nato summit in the Netherlands that begins on Tuesday.

** Ukrainian drone triggers fire in apartment building west of Moscow, official says

A Ukrainian drone struck a multi-storey apartment building outside Moscow early on Tuesday, triggering a fire and injuring two people, TASS news agency quoted a local official as saying.

Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the Moscow region, said the drone started a fire on the 17th floor of the building in the town of Krasnogorsk, west of the capital. The injured people were receiving treatment at a hospital.

Vorobyov said two other drones were shot down west of Moscow.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said earlier that Russian air defences had intercepted two Ukrainian drones heading for the city overnight.

Sobyanin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said specialists were examining the debris of at least one drone downed after midnight.

The mayor said a third drone targeting the capital had been repelled earlier in the evening.

Russia's defence ministry reported that air defence units had destroyed nine drones in a 90-minute period before midnight, including nine over the border regions of Kursk and Bryansk.

Ukraine has launched drone attacks on a wide range of targets in recent months, some a long distance from the Ukrainian border.

In one attack this month, dubbed "Operation Spider's Web," Ukrainian drones targeted long-range military aircraft at a number of Russian bases.

In recent months, Russia has stepped up mass drone attacks against Ukrainian cities. Waves of Russian drones and missiles swarming in and around Kyiv killed 10 people overnight on Sunday.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Russia strikes more Ukrainian military training sites – MOD

Russian forces have conducted strikes on two sites used by Kiev to train newly mobilized troops, the Defense Ministry said. The announcement follows the resignation of a senior Ukrainian military commander, who criticized what he described as a lack of accountability for such incidents.

Ukraine’s armed forces rely on compulsory conscription to bolster their ranks, typically sending draftees to remote training facilities for basic instruction before deploying them to the front.

According to the Russian military, Iskander missile strikes recently targeted two such facilities.

One strike, near the Ukrainian city of Sumy, reportedly resulted in up to 100 casualties and destroyed as many as 14 military vehicles, the ministry said in a statement on Monday.

The second strike, reported on Sunday, hit an area under Kiev’s control in Russia’s Kherson Region, the ministry said. This operation involved an Iskander missile equipped with a cluster warhead that allegedly killed around 70 Ukrainian troops while destroying more than 10 vehicles.

Ukraine’s military confirmed the attack on a training site but reported a significantly lower toll – three soldiers killed and 14 wounded.

In early June, Ukrainian General Mikhail Drapaty resigned as commander of the Land Forces following a similar deadly incident. In a social media post, he condemned what he called a culture of impunity within the military leadership regarding troop losses.

According to Ukraine’s Suspilne news outlet, a Russian strike killed at least 12 Ukrainian soldiers and injured 60 others on June 1. Authorities in Kiev did not disclose the exact location, but the report, citing anonymous sources, indicated it may have occurred in the Dnepropetrovsk Region.

Around the same time, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had struck the Novomoskovsky training ground in that region.

Days later, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky appointed Drapaty to oversee all frontline operations as part of a broader reshuffle in military leadership, assigning a different official to supervise conscript training.

In a report on Saturday, the Financial Times said that the newly appointed commander of Ukraine’s Ground Forces, Brigadier General Gennady Shapovalov, has been tasked with reforming the “unpopular” forced mobilization and training system.

Ukraine declared general mobilization in 2022, barring most men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country. In 2024, Kiev tightened conscription laws and lowered the draft age from 27 to 25 in response to mounting battlefield losses. The mobilization campaign has sparked numerous violent confrontations between draft officers and unwilling conscripts, while many have attempted to flee the country despite serious personal risks.

BBC/Reuters/RT