At least three people have been killed, including two children, after Russia launched another overnight wave of strikes on the Ukrainian capital, city officials have said.
A clinic and an adjacent home were struck by falling debris in Kyiv’s eastern Desnyan district, the city’s military administration said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Another four people were injured and taken to hospital.
Debris also fell on the nearby district of Dnipro, according to the mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko.
In total 14 people were injured in the attack with nine hospitalised and another five treated at the scenes, he said.
Wires are also posting new photos from the Russian city of Shebekino in the Belgorod border region, which Russian officials say was shelled for the fourth time this week by Ukrainian forces.
Some analysis here from the Institute for the Study of War on the recent attacks on Russian territory. The US-based think tank says official responses from Moscow “remain likely insufficient to satisfy the Russian ultranationalist information space’s desire for escalation in the war”.
Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, who has evacuated children from border areas, has called on Russian forces to capture Kharkiv in order to create a barrier between Belgorod and Ukraine.
But Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov refused to comment on Gladkov’s statements earlier this week and on Wednesday said that Moscow did not plan to declare martial law following Tuesday’s drone attack on Moscow.
The think tank adds:
Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin criticized Peskov, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu for their reluctance to address attacks against Russian territory.
Russian milbloggers have complained about the lack of Russian military escalation to secure border areas in Belgorod and Kursk oblasts since at least September 2022, often criticizing the Kremlin for underreacting to attacks against Russian territory and failing to fully dedicate itself to the war effort.
The evacuations and Peskov’s comments are largely consistent with Putin’s unwillingness and inability to meaningfully escalate the war short of full-scale general and economic mobilization, as ISW has previously assessed.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, says the city of Shebekino has also been shelled overnight.
In a Telegram post, Vyacheslav Gladkov said “shelling by the Armed Forces of Ukraine went on for an hour”. Two people were injured, he said.
He also said the Russian air defences in the region had worked. The Guardian is not able to verify the attack, which would be the fourth time Ukrainian artillery has shelled Shebekino this week.
Another image from the overnight strikes has come through on the wires, courtesy of Kyiv’s military administration, this time of the clinic in Desnyan which officials say was heavily damaged.
The night’s attack was launched by ground-based missile systems, Serhii Popko, the head of Kyiv military administration has said in a Telegram post.
All targets detected were destroyed by Ukraine’s air defences, he said and casualties were caused by falling debris. An update on the type and number of missiles used in the strike would be given later by the Air Force, he said.
In Desnyan district three people including two children were killed and up to 10 others injured when debris fell on a clinic and an adjacent multi-storey residential building, he said.
In Dnipro district a residential building was damaged, parked cars caught fire and debris fell on to a roadway.
The all-clear has been given in Kyiv, about an hour after air raid sirens sounded.
It’s still not clear whether the attack involved drones or missiles. Reuters reports:
Discussions on social media suggested it was a missile attack, given the short time between the declaration of the air raid alert and the impact.
The first images are coming in from the latest Russian strike on Kyiv. This shot from Kyiv’s military administration shows a residential building damaged by falling debris in the city’s Desnyan district, where three people including two children have died.
As we wait for more information from Kyiv to come in, here’s a bit of context. The past week has marked the first time that Moscow has come in for a large-scale drone attack since it launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Nobody was injured in Tuesday’s raid by more than 30 drones but they were part of a series of drone strikes and sabotage operations behind enemy lines that have intensified in recent weeks ahead of a much anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The attack on Moscow came as Russia has launched an increasing number of attacks on Kyiv, including a rare daytime raid on Tuesday, over the past month.
The attacks appear to be an effort to exhaust Ukraine’s air defences.
At least three people have been killed, including two children, after Russia launched another overnight wave of strikes on the Ukrainian capital, city officials have said.
A clinic and an adjacent home were struck by falling debris in Kyiv’s eastern Desnyan district, the city’s military administration said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Another four people were injured and taken to hospital.
Debris also fell on the nearby district of Dnipro, according to the mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko.
In total 14 people were injured in the attack with nine hospitalised and another five treated at the scenes, he said.
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine with me, Helen Livingstone.
Kyiv has once again been hit by Russian strikes overnight, with at least three people killed and another four injured so far, according to the city’s military administration. Falling debris hit a clinic in the city’s Desnyan district as well as an adjacent house. Two of the dead were children, according to the city’s mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko.
Debris also fell on the capital’s Dnipro district, where another person was injured according to Klitschko.
Other key developments:
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The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said a negotiated peace in Ukraine may have to be prioritised over putting Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, on trial for war crimes. In a speech in Bratislava, he said: “If in a few months to come, you have a window for negotiation with the existing Russian political power, the question you will have is an arbitrage between a trial and a negotiation. And you will have to negotiate with the leaders you have, de facto, even if the day after you will have to judge them in front of international justice ... Otherwise you can put yourselves just in an impossible situation where you say ‘I want you to go to jail but you are the only ones I can negotiate with’.”
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Macron also urged Nato to offer Ukraine “tangible and credible” security assurances, arguing that it was in the west’s interests to do so as Kyiv “is today protecting Europe”. Leaders will meet in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, in July to discuss Nato membership for Ukraine.
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The US has announced a new $300m arms package for Ukraine, including air defence systems and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, but warned Kyiv that US weaponry should not be used for attacks within Russia. “We have been very clear with the Ukrainians privately – we’ve certainly been clear publicly – that we do not support attacks inside Russia,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.
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A German government spokesperson has said Ukraine has the right to attack Russian territory as it qualifies as self-defence. In an interview with German news website Deutsche Welle, Steffen Hebestreit said: “International law allows Ukraine to carry out strikes on the territory of Russia for the purpose of self-defence.”
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Russia does not plan to declare martial law after Tuesday’s large-scale drone strike on Moscow, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said. The Kremlin’s comments came after several leading Russian officials and pro-war figures including Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov urged Putin to respond to the drone attacks by declaring a state of total war.
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Russia said Ukrainian artillery hit the Russian town of Shebekino on the Ukrainian border for a third time this week, injuring four people, while drones attacked two oil refineries 65-80km east of Russia’s biggest oil export terminals. Russian officials did not attribute blame for the drone attacks and said a fire at one of the terminals was put out.
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The UN has proposed that Kyiv, Moscow and Ankara start preparatory work for the transit of Russian ammonia through Ukraine as it tries to salvage a deal allowing safe Black Sea grain exports, a source close to the talks has told Reuters. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address accused Russia of blocking all activity at the port of Pivdennyi, with 1.5 million tonnes of agricultural products unable to move.
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Only 500 people are left in Bakhmut, the city in the east of Ukraine that has been subject to heavy fighting in the last year, according to its mayor. The figure from Oleksii Reva, reported by the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, is a tiny fraction of its prewar population of 70,000.
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Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, has said he has asked prosecutors to investigate “crimes” committed by senior Russian defence officials before and during the invasion of Ukraine.
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An Iraqi citizen fighting with Wagner was killed in Ukraine in early April, the first confirmed case of someone from the Middle East dying in the conflict, Prigozhin told Reuters. Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner hospital in the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, the RIA FAN news site also reported.
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Russia claimed it destroyed Ukrainian naval forces’ last major warship, the Yuri Olefirenko, which it said was stationed in the southern port of Odesa. The Russian air force said it attacked the ship on 29 May. Ukraine has not commented.
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Analysis from the Kyiv Post suggests about 90% of the 500 missiles and drones launched by Russia in May in attacks on Ukraine failed, to the cost of $1.7bn. It said 533 of them were destroyed by the Ukrainian air force, including 401 Shahed-136 drones that cost about $20,000 each.
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The Russian security council deputy chair, Dmitry Medvedev, said Britain was Moscow’s “eternal enemy”. Any British officials who facilitated the war in Ukraine could be considered legitimate military targets, he said.
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