Four people injured in Russian attack on Kyiv
As we mentioned in the opening summary, the main news so far today is that officials have said Russia attacked Kyiv with eight long-range ballistic missiles before dawn on Monday. Four people were injured by debris.
The strike – at about 4am – marked the first major attack on the Ukrainian capital in recent months using ballistic missiles.
Four people were injured by shards of shattered glass in the Darnitskyi district in south-eastern Kyiv and needed medical assistance, the national police said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Firefighters dispatched to the south-western Holosiivskyi district put out a fire that broke out when part of a missile landed on the roof of a residential building, mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram. These claims have not been independently verified.
Key events
Ukraine’s former president Leonid Kuchma has warned that the US “will lose face before the entire world” if it abandons Kyiv, and said mistakes by the west contributed to Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion last year.
In his first interview with a western publication since 2015, Kuchma described Putin as a career KGB operative.
“It’s his profession, with everything that implies,” he said, adding: “People say his obsession with Ukraine is a kind of mania or mental disorder. Maybe it’s true.”
You can read the full story by my colleague, Luke Harding, here:
Russia’s FSB says it has detained agents of Ukrainian special services
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has said that it had cracked a network of Ukrainian agents in Crimea who were involved in attempts to assassinate pro-Russian figures, Reuters reports.
It said the targets included the Moscow-appointed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, and a former pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament, Oleg Tsaryov.
Tsaryov survived despite being shot twice in an attack in October in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The FSB said the Ukrainian network had also targeted railway and energy infrastructure on the peninsula. It said it had found caches of arms and explosives, and detained 18 “agents and accomplices of the Ukrainian special services”.
It said that, overall, it had prevented 18 “terrorist attacks” this year in Crimea.
The FSB is the successor agency to the KGB, which operated throughout the cold war and was once led by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, for a period in the 1990s.
Here are some of the latest images coming from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital:
Four people injured in Russian attack on Kyiv
As we mentioned in the opening summary, the main news so far today is that officials have said Russia attacked Kyiv with eight long-range ballistic missiles before dawn on Monday. Four people were injured by debris.
The strike – at about 4am – marked the first major attack on the Ukrainian capital in recent months using ballistic missiles.
Four people were injured by shards of shattered glass in the Darnitskyi district in south-eastern Kyiv and needed medical assistance, the national police said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Firefighters dispatched to the south-western Holosiivskyi district put out a fire that broke out when part of a missile landed on the roof of a residential building, mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram. These claims have not been independently verified.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Four people were injured by falling debris after Ukrainian air defences shot down eight ballistic missiles targeting Kyiv in the early hours of Monday, officials have said, in the latest Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital.
Four people received medical aid in the Darnitskyi district in the south-eastern part of Kyiv, the capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said on Telegram while emergency services sent to the south-western district of Holosiivskyi quickly doused a fire sparked when part of a missile fell on the roof of a residential building.
Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is heading to Washington, days after the Biden administration warned it would run out of money for aid for Ukraine within weeks due to feuding among US senators.
Republican senators last week blocked $106bn in emergency aid primarily for Ukraine and Israel after conservatives balked at the exclusion of immigration reforms that they had demanded as part of the package.
Here are the latest developments:
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Zelenskiy’s office said he would arrive in Washington on Monday and that he would meet Biden during a working visit that would include “a series of meetings and discussions”. Zelenskiy has also been invited to address US senators on Tuesday morning in the Capitol, a Senate leadership aide said, while a private meeting between Zelenskiy and US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson will also be held in the Capitol on Tuesday, Johnson’s spokesperson, Raj Shah, said.
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Zelenskiy attended the swearing-in of Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, on his first official trip to Latin America where he is attempting to court support among developing nations. Milei welcomed the Ukrainian at the presidential palace after his inauguration. The two men shared an extended hug, exchanged words, and then Milei, who has said he intends to convert to Judaism, presented his Ukrainian counterpart with a menorah as a gift.
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Zelenskiy said he had had a “frank” conversation with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, on the sidelines of the inauguration. “It was as frank as possible – and obviously, it was about our European affairs,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. Orbán has threatened to block more EU aid for Ukraine as well as its membership accession talks.
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Britain said it had delivered two mine-hunting ships to Ukraine. The mine-hunters, originally HMS Grimsby and HMS Shoreham, were renamed Chernihiv and Cherkasy in Glasgow in June, and will help Ukraine to maintain a critical route for merchant shipping travelling across the Black Sea.
