Russia launched a wave of attacks on Ukraine’s capital early on Tuesday, striking Kyiv residential buildings and energy infrastructure, according to local authorities and video footage. Six people were killed, Ukrainian authorities said. A high-rise residential building was hit in a district on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River, said Tymur Tkachenko, head of the capital’s military administration. He said four people died and at least three were wounded in Svyatoshynsky district. The State Emergency Service (SES) earlier said two people died in a strike on an apartment building in the eastern Dniprovsky quarter. Pictures posted on unofficial Telegram channels showed apartments on fire on upper floors. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said a high-rise building was being evacuated after being hit in the city centre’s Pechersk district. He also reported disruptions to Kyiv’s power and water supplies. The SES said 18 people had been rescued, including three children, and it was continuing to work at the sites of “hits and debris falls”.
Ukrainian airstrikes killed one person and wounded three others in the Russian port city of Taganrog, the mayor said early Tuesday. “As a result of the massive overnight airstrike on our city, two apartment buildings, a private home, the Mechanical College building, two industrial enterprises, and Kindergarten No. 7 were damaged,” Svetlana Kambulova posted to Telegram.
Ukraine has significantly amended the US “peace plan” to end the war, removing some of Russia’s maximalist demands, people familiar with the negotiations said, as European leaders warned on Monday that no deal could be reached quickly. Volodymyr Zelenskyy may meet Donald Trump in the White House later this week, sources indicated, amid a flurry of calls between Kyiv and Washington. Luke Harding, Jon Henley and Pjotr Sauer also report that Ukraine is pressing for Europe to be involved in the talks.
The White House has pushed back against criticism – including from within the Republican party – that Donald Trump is favouring Russia in the efforts to end the war in Ukraine. “The idea that the United States of America is not engaging with both sides equally in this war to bring it to an end is a complete and total fallacy,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday. The US president was “hopeful and optimistic” that a plan could be worked out to end the war, she said.
The US-Russia peace proposal leaked to the media last week has thrown Washington, Kyiv and European capitals into disarray. Pjotr Sauer writes in this analysis that the plan has creating precisely the conditions Vladimir Putin has long sought: a negotiating table sharply tilted in the Russian president’s favour, with Ukraine cornered into weighing terms it cannot accept and the threat of losing its most important ally hanging over its head.
A heating and power plant in Russia’s Moscow region has resumed operations after shutting down due to a fire caused by a Ukrainian drone strike, regional governor Andrei Vorobyov said on Monday. The attack on Sunday on the facility in Shatura, a town of about 33,000, sparked a major blaze and cut heating for residents as night temperatures hovered around freezing. It marked one of Kyiv’s most significant strikes to date on a power station deep inside Russia.
A Lithuanian court convicted a Ukrainian national on Monday of carrying out an arson attack last year on an Ikea store in the Baltic country’s capital, Vilnius, which authorities have accused Russian military intelligence of being behind. The Vilnius regional court convicted the man of charges including a terrorist act and illegal possession of explosives and sentenced him to three years and four months in prison. The man, who was a minor at the time of the May 2024 attack, had pleaded guilty. Ikea was allegedly targeted because the company withdrew from Russia and because of Sweden’s aid to Ukraine.
