Two killed and 28 injured in Russian strike on Kyiv ahead of Trump-Zelensky meeting

Two people were killed and 28 were injured in an overnight Russian missile and drone strike on Kyiv and the surrounding region, Ukrainian officials said on Saturday, just a day before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to meet with US President Donald Trump in Florida to discuss Washington’s plan to end the war.

Zelensky said Russia had launched almost 500 drones and 40 missiles, including Kinzhal ballistic missiles, at energy facilities and residential buildings in the Ukrainian capital in an attack that continued into Saturday morning.

According to Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, the Russian strikes damaged at least 10 residential buildings across Kyiv, killing one person in the capital itself and another in the nearby city of Bila Tserkva, where footage shared by Ukrainian news outlets appeared to show a Russian drone striking a busy bus stop.

A further 28 people were injured in the strikes on Kyiv, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said, with authorities introducing emergency power outage schedules due to damage to energy facilities and some 4,000 apartment blocks left without heating in freezing temperatures. 

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said water and heat supplies had been disrupted due to the almost 10-hour attack and that energy providers were working to restore power to some 600,000 people in Kyiv and the region.

“Russia is deliberately targeting energy facilities and residential buildings during the holiday weekend. We must not give them a chance to sow despair and fear”, Svyrydenko said.

The Operational Command of Poland’s Armed Forces said it had scrambled its fighter jets during the attack, leading to the temporary closure of airports in the southeastern cities of Rzeszów and Lublin, near Poland’s border with Ukraine.

In a statement on Saturday morning, Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces had carried out the strikes “in response to Ukraine’s terrorist attacks on civilian targets on Russian territory” and had targeted energy facilities “used in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” as well as military sites.

Zelensky is expected to join a call with European leaders and Trump on Saturday before travelling to Florida to meet with the US president in person.

“There have been many questions over the past few days — so where is Russia’s response to the proposals to end the war offered by the United States and the world?”, the Ukrainian president wrote on X on Saturday following Russia’s latest attack.

“They do not want to end the war and seek to use every opportunity to cause Ukraine even greater suffering and increase their pressure on others around the world”, he continued.