Three people have been killed and at least 32 others injured in an overnight Russian air attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, the city’s mayor has said.
Two high-rise residential buildings were hit in the strikes, Vitali Klitschko said, adding in a Telegram post that six children were among the injured.
Meanwhile, Russian air defences destroyed two drones heading towards Moscow on Sunday, according to the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin.
The latest Russian bombardment comes as Moscow has stepped up attacks on civilian targets and energy infrastructure ahead of winter, with Ukrainian authorities saying nearly 1,200 drones have been launched in the past week alone.
Officials in Kyiv said the three people were killed when a drone struck a nine-storey residential building in the Desnianskyi district to the north-west of the city, with 24 others injured in the same attack.
Damage was also reported to at least three other residential buildings in Kyiv. Seven people including two children are being treated in hospital, officials said.
Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, and it currently controls around a fifth of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014.
There has been marginal movement along the front lines as fighting on the ground continues, while Ukraine has sought to hurt Russia’s warfighting ability by striking its military production plants and oil facilities that are essential to its economy.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has recently called on allies to supply his armed forces with long range weapons to continue doing so.
However, he came away from a recent meeting at the White House and subsequent EU summit empty-handed.
US President Donald Trump did announce new sanctions targeting Russia’s largest oil companies this week – the first time he had done so in his current term – as did the EU.
Trump said that talks with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “don’t go anywhere” as he shelved plans for the two to meet in Budapest over the war in Ukraine.
On his way to Asia over the weekend, Trump said he had a “great relationship” with Putin but that recent events had been “disappointing”, suggesting a meeting between the two was conditional on a peace deal being likely.
Trump has appeared increasingly frustrated with Russian conditions for bringing the war to a close, with a summit in Alaska in August failing to yield any tangible results.
The US president had previously said fresh sanctions on Moscow were contingent on European allies cutting their Russian energy imports. The EU has pledged to do so by 2028.
Zelensky has agreed to a US proposal to cease fighting along the current front lines so peace negotiations can begin – though this falls short of Russian demands that Ukrainian forces completely withdraw from the eastern Donbas region.
However, senior Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who met US officials in Washington on Friday and Saturday, told CNN that he believed Russia, Ukraine and the US were close to a diplomatic solution to end the war.
“It’s a big move by President Zelensky to already acknowledge that it’s about battle lines,” Dmitriev said.
“You know, his previous position was that Russia should leave completely so actually, I think we are reasonably close to a diplomatic solution that can be worked out.”
Meanwhile, Russia said it conducted a test of an experimental nuclear-powered missile on Sunday, which has been hailed as having a potentially unlimited range and the ability to evade missile defences.
