Ukraine war briefing: Russia strikes Kyiv hours before truce begins in war-ravaged city Oleshky

Russian strikes on Kyiv killed one person and wounded eight, with mayor Vitali Klitschko saying medical facilities and an intensive care unit had been damaged in the late Monday attack. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a ballistic missile attack had struck the grounds of a university campus in the Ukrainian capital. “The missiles hit very crowded areas, and there is not a single military facility nearby. This was a strike directly on the city, on its infrastructure,” he said on social media.

The strikes on Kyiv came hours before a truce in the ravaged Russian-occupied city of Oleshky was due to start, after months of reports that residents faced dire food, water and medicine shortages. The truce, aimed at allowing humanitarian aid into Oleshky, was to begin at 3am local time (0100 GMT). No end date for the truce has been provided. The city in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region has been caught in the crosshairs of fighting between the two sides since 2022, when it was seized by Russian forces. Neither Russia, Ukraine nor the US has said who would monitor the truce, or given details about the humanitarian operation set to accompany it. The Russian defence ministry said on Friday it would halt fire in the “Kherson sector” for the duration of the ceasefire. Ukraine has accused Russia of blocking residents from leaving, a charge Moscow has denied.

Before the latest strikes on Kyiv, Zelenskyy highlighted ​Ukraine was still waiting for US defence secretary Pete Hegseth to sign off on critical missile supplies. “We have been waiting for nearly a month for Mr Hegseth to sign off on missiles for Patriots and NASAMS. I instructed our team to raise this with the ⁠American side once again,” he said on X.

Romania said on Monday that a network “coordinated” from Russia was involved in starting a fire near an arms factory. The fire broke out on 14 September near an arms factory in the central city of Brasov and two Belarusians and a Ukrainian – residents in EU countries – were involved, authorities said. Two of them were “tracked down and remanded in custody in Germany while they were preparing to commit similar offences”, the office for organised crime said. The third is at large in Poland, it added. Russia’s embassy in Bucharest could not immediately be reached for comment but Moscow has repeatedly denied such accusations.

The attack in Brasov is the latest in a string of similar incidents in Europe, with Nato and the EU grappling with what they say is a “hybrid” campaign of sabotage and interference by the Kremlin aimed at undercutting Western support for Kyiv. Over the past three weeks, at ​least eight cargo ​ships have been hit off the coast of Nato members Romania and Bulgaria. Some 34 sailors are reported dead or missing.

Ukraine’s military has begun using specialised aerial rescue drones to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield, carrying two stranded troops to safety near the Russian border in the first such operations. The newly developed StarGate drone, a six-rotor aircraft fitted with an enclosed evacuation capsule, was used in two separate missions over the past week, the 475th Separate Assault Regiment, an elite unit, said on Monday. Developed by Ukrainian technology company SkyFall, the drone is intended to reduce rescue times from hours to minutes, reaching hard-to-access combat zones currently served by unmanned ground vehicles.