Emergency workers continue the search for bodies trapped under the rubble of a residential building in Odesa, southern Ukraine, 27 January 2026. Photo: State Emergency Service of Ukraine
“Massive” Russian military drone strikes on the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa on Monday night injured 22 people and caused extensive damage to civilian infrastructure, Serhiy Lysak, the head of the region’s military administration, said on Tuesday morning.
The attacks formed part of a wider Russian overnight aerial campaign targeting multiple cities across Ukraine, including Kharkiv and Kryvyi Rih in the east of the country, and resulted in several multiple-storey residential buildings in Odesa being damaged, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said.
Elsewhere in Odesa, a church and a kindergarten in the city centre were also struck in the attack, Lysak said. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said on Tuesday morning that three people were still believed to be trapped under the rubble of one apartment building.
“Emergency services have all been working at the site of the strikes since late last night. Operational headquarters have been set up and people are being provided with all necessary assistance,” Lysak said on Tuesday morning.
The attacks came just hours after news broke on Monday that Russian airstrikes had damaged the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra — one of the most important monastery complexes in Eastern Orthodoxy — over the weekend, which, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha, had not been damaged since World War II.
Sybiha accused Russia of carrying out “repeated and systematic attacks” on Ukraine’s “heritage, faith, and cultural landmarks”, and called on UNESCO to publicly condemn the latest strikes in order to “hold Russia accountable”.
Following talks in Abu Dhabi with Russia and the US on Friday and Saturday during which he said “a range of important issues … necessary to end the war” were discussed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that Kyiv was preparing for a new round of trilateral peace talks with Moscow and Washington in the UAE on Sunday.
On Sunday, the Ukrainian leader said that an agreement with the US on post-war security guarantees to protect Ukraine from future Russian attacks was “100% ready” to be signed, though he reiterated that Ukraine’s stance on its eastern Donbas region remained unchanged.
Nevertheless, uncertainty as to whether Ukraine may be forced to accept territorial concessions as part of a prospective US-mediated peace deal with Russia has only increased in the past month, with the Trump administration saying it would only provide security guarantees to Ukraine if Kyiv agreed to cede the parts of the Donbas still under its control to Russia, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
