Russian forces attacked Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, its second-largest city of Kharkiv and other centers early yesterday, officials said, triggering fires and dealing new blows to energy infrastructure.
The strikes injured four people, officials in the two largest cities said. They came on the eve of the next planned three-sided talks on resolving the nearly four-year-old war in the United Arab Emirates.
In Kyiv, as nighttime temperatures dipped close to minus-20°C, witnesses reported loud explosions after midnight, saying both missiles and drones were being deployed.
Photo: Reuters
The strikes caused damage in five districts, hitting three apartment blocks and a building housing a kindergarten, Tymur Tkachenko, head of the city’s military administration, said on social media.
Flames consumed an apartment on the upper floors of a Kyiv block in videos posted on social media. An air raid alert stayed in effect for more than five hours.
A series of massive attacks on the capital since New Year’s Day have knocked out power and heating to hundreds of apartment blocks and emergency crews were still trying to restore heating systems on Monday.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the attacks targeted energy infrastructure and called for tough decisions to keep heating systems from freezing. Coolant needed to be drained from 820 apartment buildings supplied by a single thermal plant.
“The goal is obvious — to cause maximum destruction and leave the city without heat in severe cold,” Terekhov wrote on social media.
Public broadcaster Suspilne said that Russian strikes had knocked out power in two towns in the Kharkiv region, Izium and Balakliia, and struck two apartment buildings in the northern city of Sumy.
The attacks also coincided with talk of a moratorium on strikes on energy infrastructure adopted by both Russia and Ukraine at the request of US President Donald Trump.
Russia said the ceasefire ended on Sunday, while Ukraine said it was to continue for a week from Friday last week.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday said that Russia had not targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure with missile or drone strikes in the previous 24 hours, but steady Russian shelling hit energy facilities near the front line.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
RSS