Russia Strikes Kyiv Hours Before Humanitarian Truce Is Due to Begin in Oleshky

Russian strikes on Kyiv late on Monday killed one person and wounded eight, according to the city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko. He said medical facilities, including an intensive care unit, were damaged in the attack.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a ballistic missile strike hit the grounds of a university campus in the capital. In a post on social media he said the missiles landed in very crowded areas with no military facility nearby. "This was a strike directly on the city, on its infrastructure," he said.

The attack came only hours before a truce was scheduled to take effect in Oleshky, a Russian-occupied city in Ukraine's southern Kherson region. The pause, due to start at 3am local time (0100 GMT), is intended to allow humanitarian aid into a city where residents have reportedly faced severe shortages of food, water and medicine for months. No end date has been announced.

Oleshky has been caught between the two sides' fighting since Russian forces seized it in 2022. Neither Russia, Ukraine nor the United States has said who will monitor the truce or described the humanitarian operation that is meant to accompany it. The Russian defence ministry said on Friday that it would halt fire in the "Kherson sector" for the length of the ceasefire. Ukraine has accused Russia of preventing residents from leaving, which Moscow denies.

Before the Kyiv strikes, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was still waiting on US defence secretary Pete Hegseth to approve critical missile supplies. "We have been waiting for nearly a month for Mr Hegseth to sign off on missiles for Patriots and NASAMS," he wrote on X, adding that he had told his team to raise the matter again with the American side.

Separately, Romania said on Monday that a network coordinated from Russia was involved in starting a fire near an arms factory in the central city of Brasov on 14 September. Authorities said two Belarusians and a Ukrainian, all residents of EU countries, were involved. Two were tracked down and remanded in custody in Germany while preparing similar offences, the organised crime office said, and the third remains at large in Poland. Russia's embassy in Bucharest could not immediately be reached for comment, and Moscow has repeatedly denied such accusations.

The Brasov fire is the latest in a series of incidents in Europe. Nato and the EU say they are dealing with a "hybrid" campaign of sabotage and interference by the Kremlin, aimed at weakening Western support for Kyiv. Over the past three weeks, at least eight cargo ships have been hit off the coasts of Nato members Romania and Bulgaria, and about 34 sailors are reported dead or missing.

On the battlefield, Ukraine's military has started using specialised aerial rescue drones to evacuate wounded soldiers. The 475th Separate Assault Regiment, an elite unit, said on Monday that the new StarGate drone carried two stranded troops to safety near the Russian border in two separate missions over the past week, the first such operations.

Built by the Ukrainian technology company SkyFall, StarGate is a six-rotor aircraft with an enclosed evacuation capsule. It is meant to cut rescue times from hours to minutes in hard-to-reach combat zones that are currently served by unmanned ground vehicles. Monday marked day 1,707 of the war.