At least one person has been hospitalised after a wave of explosions were heard in Kyiv during Monday morning. Mayor Vitali Kitschko said that the person had been in the Podilskyi district in the north of the city. The local authority reported that the roof of a two-story building caught fire in the district as a result of falling debris, but that the fire was contained. “The enemy used missiles of a ballistic trajectory – preliminarily Iskanders. There is a possibility that S-300 and S-400 missiles were also used,” air force spokesperson Yuri Ihnat told Ukrainian TV.
Ukraine reported that Russia launched up to 40 cruise missiles and about 35 drones overnight: air defence claimed to have shot down 37 missiles and 29 “Shahed” drones.
An unspecified military target in the western Khmelnytskyi region was struck, with the regional governor reporting that “five aircraft were disabled” and that a fire had broken out in a fuel warehouse.
In Odesa, fragments of a downed kamikaze drone hit the port infrastructure causing a fire, and rockets and drones were shot down over Lviv, Kirovohrad, Poltava and Mykolaiv regions.
Serhii Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration said Russia was trying to exhaust the country’s air defences with the increased attacks, adding “the enemy is trying to keep the civilian population in deep psychological tension”. Mayor Klitschko added: “Another difficult night for the capital. But, thanks to the professionalism of our defenders, as a result of the air attack of the barbarians in Kyiv, there was no damage or destruction of infrastructural and other objects.
The Kyiv city administration has posted to Telegram to state that “during the daytime shelling of the capital, more than 41,000 people were in the underground” today, and that overnight “more than 9,000 citizens took refuge in subway stations, including 1,120 children”. It claimed “this is the largest number of people who stayed at the stations at night during the current month”.
Wagner boss Yevgheny Prigozhin “appears to have again indirectly undermined Russian president Vladimir Putin’s authority and regime”, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has written in its latest analysis of the conflict. The US-based think tank bases its assertion on the response given by Prigozhin to a journalist asking about Russian state media’s ban on any discussion of Wagner. Prigozhin said that officials could have benefited from their historic ability to censor information if Russia had not declared war on Ukraine. He then shifted to addressing a single, unnamed official: “If you are starting a war, please have character, will, and steel balls - and only then you will be able to achieve something.”
The adviser to the head of the office of Ukraine’s president, Mykhailo Podolyak, has suggested that any peace settlement acceptable to Ukraine would include not only a restoration of the country’s sovereign borders, but a demilitarised zone extending between 100km and 120km into Russia.
The foreign ministers of Sweden and Turkey will meet “soon” to discuss Stockholm’s delayed bid to join Nato, the Swedish foreign ministry said on Monday.
Foreign investors who left Russia after selling their businesses there between March 2022 and March 2023 withdrew about $36 billion from the country, the state RIA news agency, citing analysis of data from the Central Bank.
The death toll from a Russian missile attack on a medical facility in Dnipro on Friday has risen from two to four people, according to the region’s governor.
Russian attacks near the eastern city of Bakhmut, the scene of heavy fighting in recent months, abated slightly over the weekend, according to a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military.
Thousands of children have been kidnapped and taken to Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year. According to the Ukrainian government, 16,226 children have been deported to Russia, of whom 10,513 have been located, and more than 300 have returned. Some fear the numbers of missing could be an underestimate.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has said that if any other country wants to join a Russia-Belarus union there could be “nuclear weapons for everyone”. Russia moved ahead last week with a plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, in the Kremlin’s first deployment of such warheads outside Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.
Russia’s interior ministry has put US senator Lindsey Graham on a wanted list, Russian news agency Tass has reported.
The Russian ambassador to the UK, Andrei Kelin, told the BBC that the west’s supplying of weapons to Ukraine risked escalating the conflict to levels not yet seen. Russia had “enormous resources and we haven’t just started yet to act very seriously”, he said.
Russia said its air defence systems destroyed several drones as they approached the Ilsky oil refinery in the Krasnodar region near the Black Sea on Sunday. “Several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) tried to approach the territory of the Ilsky oil refinery in the Krasnodar Krai,” the region’s emergency officials said on the Telegram messaging channel. “All of them were neutralized, the infrastructure of the plant was not damaged.” It was not possible to verify the report.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has appointed a panel to investigate US allegations that a Russian ship collected weapons from a naval base near Cape Town last year, the presidency said in a statement. The allegations have caused a diplomatic row between the US, South Africa and Russia and called into question South Africa’s non-aligned position on the Ukraine conflict.
