Russian strikes on Ukraine’s capital killed at least four people and wounded more than a dozen others, local officials said Saturday (August 1, 2026), after Kyiv’s mayor warned of a ballistic missile attack.

It comes after the United Nations found June was the deadliest month for civilians in Ukraine since April 2022, as Moscow ramped up its long-range strikes on towns and cities across Ukraine.

Kyiv’s military administration said the strikes had killed four people, and the city’s mayor reported 15 people, including two boys aged 13 and 17, were wounded and transported to hospital.

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“Explosions in the city. Kyiv is under ballistic missile attack. Stay in shelters!” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote earlier on Telegram.

AFP journalists also reported hearing explosions.

More than 10 explosions were heard in a row, the journalists reported, adding that the intensity of the blasts triggered car alarms on the streets.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has escalated its retaliatory strikes on Russia in recent months, partly to pressure Moscow to the negotiating table after nearly four-and-a-half years of war.

Russian online retail giant Wildberries said Friday its logistics facility in Volgograd caught fire after an overnight attack — the latest in a series of strikes on the company’s facilities.

Kyiv has accused the e-commerce giant — which employs thousands of people and has become a key part of the economy — of storing drone parts and helping the Russian army.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with U.S. President Donald Trump this week for talks, as Kyiv and Moscow carried out long-range strikes.

Mr. Zelenskyy said following the meeting that Mr. Trump had agreed to license the production of Patriot missiles to Ukraine, but the U.S. president only said that “many things were discussed” and “the meeting went very well!”

Russia pummelled ​Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with ⁠ballistic missiles early on Saturday (july 11, 2026), injuring at least six ‌people, officials said.

A Reuters witness heard a ‌series of powerful ‌explosions in the city before ⁠the air alert was announced.

The attack damaged a non-residential ​building in ‌one district, while smoke was coming from another and an office building was ‌in flames as a ​result of the strike, the city military ⁠administration said on the Telegram messaging app.

A transformer ‌substation was on fire as well, said Mayor Vitali Klitschko, while windows were blown out in some residential ‌buildings.

Russia has stepped up attacks ​in the capital in recent weeks. So far ⁠this month, strikes on ⁠Kyiv and the surrounding region have killed ‌more than 60 people.

Ukrainian drone strikes caused fires at more Russian oil facilities overnight into Saturday (May 30, 2026), Russian officials said, in what appeared to be the latest attack on Moscow’s vital oil industry.

Authorities in Russia’s Rostov region said falling drone debris sparked a fire that damaged an oil depot and tanker in the port of Taganrog, while officials in the neighbouring Krasnodar region reported a fire breaking out at an oil depot in Armavir for the same reason.

“Another facility of Russia’s oil industry has been reached — Armavir,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X, referring to the Krasnodar attack, and noting that Armavir is “500 kilometers from our state border.”

“We are rightfully bringing the war back to where it came from,” he wrote.

Ukraine has expanded its mid- and long-range strike capabilities, deploying drone and missile technology that it has developed domestically to battle Russia’s four-year-old invasion.

Attacks on Russian oil assets that play a key part in funding the invasion have become almost daily occurrences.

For its part, Russia has used its long-range ballistic missiles to damage Ukraine’s power grid and hammer its cities. The Ukrainian capital is bracing for further heavy bombardments after what the Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier this week would be upcoming “systemic strikes” on Kyiv.

Mr. Zelenskyy said that he’s being “very persistent” in pressing the United States to provide his country with more Patriot air defence missiles that can counter devastating Russian ballistic missile attacks.

The attacks on Russian oil infrastructure came a day after a Russian drone that was part of an attack on Ukraine struck an apartment building in eastern Romania, injuring two people in the NATO member country. The incursion added to concerns that the war could spread across the alliance’s borders, and drew strong condemnation across Europe.

Meanwhile, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom said Saturday that a Ukrainian drone struck the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

There was no damage to key equipment, but the attack left a hole in the wall of a turbine hall, Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev said. He was quoted as saying by Russian state media that the fact that the drone was controlled via fiber optics “completely rules out the possibility of an accidental impact.”

Ukraine did not immediately comment on the incident.

The plant is in an area under Russian control since early in Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is not in service, but it needs reliable power to cool its six shutdown reactors and spent fuel to avoid any catastrophic nuclear incidents.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly expressed alarm about the nuclear plant, Europe’s biggest.

Large-scale Russian strikes on Kyiv killed one person and wounded at least 31 others, city authorities said on Thursday (May 14, 2026), as Moscow ramped up attacks on Ukraine following a short-lived ceasefire.

AFP journalists in the capital heard air raid sirens wailing before a series of loud explosions that lasted throughout the night, spurring residents of the capital to seek shelter in metro stations.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had launched more than 670 attack drones and 56 missiles in the attack that homed in on targets mainly in Kyiv. “These are definitely not the actions of those who believe the war is coming to an end. It is important that partners do not remain silent about this strike,” he wrote on social media, warning that more people could be trapped under the rubble at strike sites.

The Ukrainian leader added that more than twenty locations in Kyiv had been damaged, including residential buildings, a school, a vet and other civilian infrastructure.

Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said one person was killed and 16 others were wounded in the barrage on the city. Ukraine’s state emergency service later reported 31 people, including a child, had been wounded in strikes across the Kyiv region.

Military authorities said the strikes hit six districts of the capital and six more in the surrounding region. At daybreak, AFP journalists saw rescue workers searching for survivors in the rubble of destroyed buildings in Kyiv. Rescuers were seen hauling a wounded person from a partially collapsed residential building.

Ukraine’s emergency service said those search and rescue operations were ongoing. Strikes from both Moscow and Kyiv resumed after Russia ended a three-day ceasefire with Ukraine on Tuesday (May 12, 2026).

Ukraine ties attack on Kyiv to the Beijing summit

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha tied the overnight attack to the Xi-Trump summit, saying the assault proved Russia was a threat to international security.

“At the very time when leaders of the most powerful countries are meeting in Beijing, and the world hopes for peace, predictability and cooperation, Putin launched hundreds of drones, ballistic and cruise missiles at the capital of Ukraine,” Mr. Sybiha said on Telegram.

He said there should be “no illusions” about ending the Russian war on Ukraine. “Only pressure on Moscow can make him stop,” he said of President Putin, adding that U.S. and Chinese leaders had sufficient leverage to compel Russia to end the conflict.

U.S. President Donald Trump had announced the pause last week, hours before Russian leader Vladimir Putin presided over a scaled-down military parade in Red Square to mark the anniversary of victory in World War II. Mr. Zelenskyy has urged Trump to discuss ending the conflict during his meetings this week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Russia has pounded Ukrainian cities for more than four years, but it usually launches large-scale drone and missile attacks at night. One day earlier, a barrage of “at least 800 Russian drones” targeting mainly western Ukraine killed six people and wounded dozens of others.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has spurred the worst conflict in Europe since World War II, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing millions more.

With inputs from AFP, AP