Ukraine-Russia war latest: Putin bombards Kyiv after ‘invincible’ nuclear-capable missile test

At least three people were killed after Russia targeted Ukraine’s capital with drones, officials said.

At least 29 people were wounded, seven of them children, in the second consecutive nighttime attack on Kyiv to claim civilian lives.

Ukraine’s interior minister Ihor Klymenko said a 19-year-old woman and her 46-year-old mother were among the killed.

Russian drones caused fires in two residential buildings in the capital’s Desnianskyi district. Emergency crews evacuated civilians from a nine-story and a 16-story building, put out flames and cleared the rubble.

Russia attacked Ukraine with 101 drones overnight into Sunday, according to Ukraine’s air force, of which 90 were shot down and neutralised. Five drones hit four locations and drone debris fell on five other places, the statement said.

At least two airports in Moscow were shut down as Russia engaged its air defence systems overnight to repel Ukrainian drone attacks, officials said.

Russian aviation watchdog Rosaviatsiya said that the large Domodedovo airport and the smaller Zhukovsky airport were closed to ensure air safety, starting at 2240 GMT.

Within a span of five hours, starting at just before 10pm last night Moscow time, Russian defence units downed 28 drones, said Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin.

The information on any potential damage was not immediately clear.

Russia’s defence ministry rarely discloses the full scale of damages inflicted by Ukrainian strikes inside its territory unless civilian objects are involved.

Slovakia will not take part in any European Union programme aimed at financing military help for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion, Prime Minister Robert Fico said on Sunday.

Slovakia stopped state military aid for Ukraine when Fico’s government came to power in 2023, but has still allowed commercial sales. Fico differs with European Union states on the war, saying a solution is not on the battlefield.

EU leaders agreed on Thursday to meet Ukraine’s “pressing financial needs” for the next two years but held off on endorsing a plan to use frozen Russian assets to fund a 140 billion euro loan to Kyiv.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said the money could be used right away to strengthen Ukraine’s air defence, air fleet and frontline positions.

“I refuse to allow Slovakia to take part in any financial scheme aimed at helping Ukraine manage the war and military spending,” Fico told a televised news conference.

After efforts to negotiate an end to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine appeared to come to a standstill, the Trump administration made the move in a bid to “increase pressure on Russia’s energy sector” and “degrade the Kremlin’s ability to raise revenue for its war machine and support its weakened economy”.

Karl Matchett reports:

Polish prime minister Donald Tusk has warned that Britain would be in the line of fire if the Kremlin were to attack a Nato country, and said he is been “shocked” by the level of public complacency about the UK’s safety.

Referring to the Russia-linked arson attacks on UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s former family home in Kentish Town, London, he told the Sunday Times of his shock.

“The problem is that no one in Britain was [taken aback] by this. I was shocked, frankly speaking,” Tusk said. “After information about it appeared in the British press, the reaction was like it was just an Arsenal-Liverpool football match. But if the Russians are ready and able to organise something like that, it means that they are ready and able to do anything.”

He added that if Moscow deployed its new hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missiles to Belarus or Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave next to Poland, it would be easily capable of unleashing a nuclear warhead in any European capital, including London, given the missiles’ range of up to 2,000 miles.

“The threat is global and universal, above all because of technology,” Tusk said. “You and we are both already under massive attack in cyberspace. In Poland they are ready to destroy the cyberinfrastructure [underpinning] our railways, our hospitals. It could be really painful. This is why you can’t live under this sweet illusion that you are too far away from them, that it’s not your war, it’s just Ukraine or Poland.”

Polish prime minister Donald Tusk has said that Ukraine is concerned about the toll the war could take on its population and economy if it were to stretch on for longer than a few more years.

“I have no doubts Ukraine will survive as an independent state,” Tusk told the Sunday Times. “Now the main question is how many victims we will see. President Zelensky told me [on Thursday] that he hopes that the war will not last ten years, but that Ukraine is ready to fight for another two, three years.”