1 month ago
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Russia launched a wave of drones and missiles at Ukraine in an overnight attack on Monday, killing at least one person in Kyiv and hitting a metro station where hundreds of people were sheltering.
There were fires across the capital and at least six people were wounded. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said rescuers and medics were working on sites in four districts.
Smoke engulfed Lukianivska metro station, in an area that Moscow has repeatedly targeted. The Kremlin has dramatically stepped up its aerial bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities in recent months, with Kyiv frequently bombed.
“The station’s entrance was damaged as a result of the attack,” Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on Monday, adding that shops, businesses and a kindergarten were also hit.
Video shows people standing on an underground platform filled with swirling dust. One woman can be heard sobbing.
Max, a 32-year-old resident, told the Guardian: “My friend ran to the underground. He called me during the night and said he heard the strike. Part of the building and even the roof tumbled down the escalator. There was smoke billowing on the platform.
“If you walk around here it’s like hell on earth. During the day it’s OK. When the night starts, it’s always really hard. This is at least the fifth time Lukianivska has been bombarded. Windows are blown out. If smoke can now reach underground, where do we hide?”
It was another tense and sleepless night for Kyiv residents. A swarm of drones could be heard buzzing above the city soon after 2am. There were multiple explosions and loud booms, as air defence batteries tried to bring them down. The raid ended three hours later, at about 5am.
The western city of Ivano-Frankivsk – hundreds of miles from the frontline – was also badly hit. Its mayor, Ruslan Martsinkiv, said it was the biggest attack since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022, with several people in surrounding villages hurt. Explosions were also reported in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.
The strikes come days after Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Kyiv had proposed a new round of peace talks to Moscow.
So far two rounds of talks in Istanbul have failed to result in any progress towards a ceasefire, instead yielding large-scale prisoner exchanges and deals to return the bodies of soldiers killed in the war.
The Kremlin said this month it was ready to continue negotiations with Ukraine after the US president, Donald Trump, gave Russia 50 days to strike a peace deal or face sanctions. There is no indication that Putin has changed his maximalist demands, however.
His spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Sunday that reaching a deal was “not simple” and that Moscow’s “objectives” had to be fulfilled. They include seizing further Ukrainian territory and replacing Zelenskyy and his pro-western government.
The EU on Friday agreed an 18th package of sanctions on Moscow that targeted Russian banks and lowers a price cap on oil exports, in an attempt to curb its ability to fund the war.
