A toy lies with debris on the ground at the site of an overnight Russian air attack on a residential area, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in a location given as Kharkiv, Ukraine in this screengrab obtained from a handout video released on August 18, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Reuters/Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office
A Russian air attack overnight on a residential area in Kharkiv killed three people, including a toddler, and injured 17, Ukrainian authorities said on Monday (August 18, 2025), as the United States presses Kyiv to take a quick deal to end a war Moscow started.
A drone attack killed the two-year-old boy in Ukraine’s second-largest city early on Monday (August 18, 2025), after a ballistic missile strike the previous night, Oleh Synehubov, the Governor of the wider Kharkiv region, said on messaging app Telegram.
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The number of the injured from the Kharkiv attack was “continuously increasing”, Synehubov added.
Also on Telegram, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said two more were killed and 17 injured in both attacks, among them six children aged from six to 17.
“A woman has just been rescued from under the rubble: she is alive,” Terekhov said in a post early on Monday, warning that more might be trapped under the rubble.
Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine near the border with Russia, has been the target of regular Russian drone and missile attacks since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The earlier ballistic missile strike on the city shattered about 1,000 windows, Synehubov said. Some residents had to be evacuated, Ukraine’s state emergency service said on Telegram.
Reuters witnesses saw medics attending to residents on a street and rescuers inspecting damage in residential buildings.
Two people were injured in Russia’s strikes on the adjacent region of Sumy that also damaged at least a dozen homes and an educational institution, authorities said.
“The enemy continues to deliberately target civilian infrastructure in the Sumy region — treacherously, at night,” Oleh Hryhorov, the head of the regional administration, said on Telegram.
Reuters could not independently verify the weapons used by Russia. There was no immediate comment from Moscow. Both sides deny targeting civilians in their strikes, but thousands of people have died, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
President Donald Trump, who hosted President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday for talks aimed at ending the war, has urged Kyiv to make a deal with Moscow, stating, “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not.”
Published – August 18, 2025 09:48 am IST
