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Overnight barrages of Russian drone and missile attacks targeting the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro have left at least three residents dead and 21 more injured, regional officials confirmed Saturday. Dnipropetrovsk regional governor Oleksandr Ganzha announced that rescue teams recovered the three fatalities from the collapsed rubble of a destroyed private home, warning that additional civilians may still be trapped beneath the debris.

In a social media post on Telegram, Ganzha detailed that the sustained overnight assault ignited multiple fires across the city, damaging or partially destroying several multi-story apartment blocks, local commercial establishments, and one residential property. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also confirmed Saturday that 11 of those injured remain hospitalized for treatment following the attack.

Further south in Ukraine’s Odesa region, located along the Black Sea coast southwest of Dnipro, another overnight drone strike left two people wounded. Odesa regional governor Oleh Kiper stated that the attack damaged residential structures, critical port infrastructure, and multiple civilian vehicles in the southern part of the region.

The wave of violence extended across the border into western Russia, where a drone strike in the Belgorod border region killed one civilian woman and left a civilian man with severe injuries, according to local Russian officials.

These coordinated cross-border attacks came just 24 hours after Moscow and Kyiv completed a prisoner swap, exchanging 193 captured military personnel between the two warring sides. This recent exchange marks one of the rare constructive developments emerging from months of stagnant U.S.-brokered negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Those talks have failed to deliver any meaningful progress on the core sticking points that have prevented a diplomatic end to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has now entered its third year (correction of original typo for clarity).

In a frontline Ukrainian city that has endured relentless military pressure, a quiet morning shift preparation turned into a deadly attack that underscores the hidden human and animal cost of the ongoing war. In early February, a Russian drone crashed directly into the compound of the “Give a Paw, Friend” animal shelter in Zaporizhzhia, just as staff were changing into their work uniforms. While the shelter’s thick steel entrance door absorbed the brunt of the blast and likely saved the lives of all human workers, more than 12 animals housed at the facility did not survive the strike.

“It was terrifying, to put it mildly,” recalled Iryna Didur, the organisation’s director. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, local residents poured into the damaged shelter to clear rubble and round up animals that had fled in panic. Even the local energy provider, which has itself repeatedly been targeted by Russian strikes, donated and installed a new reinforced steel door to replace the destroyed one. Within three days, nearly all the debris had been cleared, a speed Didur credits to the outpouring of community support. “We’ve got very good people here in Zaporizhzhia. A lot of them have been visiting us to help,” she told the BBC.

Didur’s group is just one of dozens of grassroots and formal organisations across Ukraine that have dedicated themselves to caring for animals displaced by the ongoing conflict. Beyond providing emergency shelter, food and veterinary care, these groups carry out dangerous evacuation missions to move abandoned pets out of frontline zones, and run neutering programs to control growing stray animal populations.

The scale of the animal displacement crisis is staggering. As millions of Ukrainians fled escalating Russian bombardment near conflict lines, countless pets were left behind when owners had no way to bring them along. Other animals have been left homeless after their owners were killed in attacks. For Lala Tarapakina, head of the 12 Guardians animal rescue charity, the first sight of disoriented former family pets wandering empty roads near the front line pushed her to launch large-scale evacuation work. “That was the first time I witnessed the catastrophe affecting animals,” she said. “They were walking along a road, and they obviously used to be family pets. It was awful.”

Since that moment, Tarapakina’s organisation has rescued more than 40,000 animals, many extracted directly from active combat zones under constant artillery and drone threat. “Many people were forced to flee under shelling, losing friends, relatives and limbs along the way. They left lots of animals behind, and we evacuated them under artillery shelling,” she explained. Rescued animals are either placed in permanent foster or adoptive homes, housed in temporary shelters away from the front, or reunited with their displaced owners. These missions also save the lives of owners themselves, many of whom have refused to evacuate without their companion animals. In one notable case, a woman named Alla became the last person to leave her village in the Donetsk region because she refused to abandon the cats and dogs in her care. “I love them all! How could I abandon them? I probably wouldn’t survive, my heart would just break,” she told Ukrainian media.

The crisis is not limited to traditional companion pets, either. In the northern Sumy region, a specialist police evacuation unit recently assisted a local farmer extract his 11 goats from an active bombardment zone. Even with widespread support for animal rescue efforts, moving animals out of dangerous areas remains a massive challenge. Many Ukrainians have chosen to stay in high-risk frontline areas because travelling with animals is prohibitively expensive and logistically complicated, and finding pet-friendly rental accommodation in safer western and central regions of Ukraine is extremely difficult. Cross-border evacuation to other European countries is even harder, requiring extensive veterinary paperwork including proof of rabies vaccination that many displaced owners cannot obtain under bombardment.

For rescue volunteers and workers, operating in active conflict zones carries constant mortal risk. Nate Mook, who leads the Hachiko Foundation – an organisation that provides veterinary care, pet food, and runs 150 feeding stations for homeless animals along the front line – says his teams now carry drone detection equipment and fit their vehicles with anti-drone netting to protect against attacks. “We’ve had to relocate in certain areas because it became too dangerous, and unfortunately, some of the areas where we began our work in 2022 are now no-go zones,” he said.

Amid the widespread destruction, stray animals have become a constant presence along frontline positions, to the point that Ukrainian soldiers joke that cats and dogs are now standard military issue. Outside the eastern town of Kupyansk, a drone unit driver has been accompanied for more than two years by a pet maltipoo that lives and travels with the unit. The 831st Myrhorod Tactical Aviation Brigade hosts a ginger stray cat that reportedly appears near air defence positions during every air raid, sitting silently beside artillery guns as if standing duty alongside the troops.

Observers often question why rescuers choose to risk their lives to save animals amid widespread human suffering, but rescue leaders say the work provides critical hope for a population traumatized by years of war. “Saving one animal is the same as saving several people because it gives them hope,” Tarapakina said. “By rescuing one dog, you make an average of about 10 people happy. That’s good maths, isn’t it?” Mook, who previously ran crisis food relief organization World Central Kitchen, notes that animals share the same trauma as human civilians, but have no ability to flee or protect themselves. “Dogs and cats have no choice about what’s happening around them, and there’s this sense that they are really powerless. They are equally traumatised and shell-shocked, and the same thing that humans go through, the animals also go through,” he said. “It is not a case of helping one or the other, and animals do not start wars,” he added.

In the quiet dead of night, two catastrophic events have shaken the Chernobyl nuclear site, separated by nearly four decades and forever linked to Ukraine’s history of crisis. The first, at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, tore through Reactor No. 4 during a routine safety test, sending a deadly plume of radiation across Europe, unraveling public trust in the Soviet Union, and leaving a permanent scar on the region that many historians link to the bloc’s eventual collapse. The second, recorded at 1:59 a.m. on February 14, 2025, is a new wound inflicted by war: Ukrainian officials attribute the blast to an explosive-laden Russian drone that hit the iconic New Safe Confinement (NSC), the massive protective structure that caps the site of the 1986 disaster. While far less catastrophic than the original explosion, the strike has sparked urgent global anxiety over nuclear safety in an era of full-scale invasion, turning a site already synonymous with suffering into another frontline of Russia’s campaign.

For the thousands of workers who tend to the decommissioned plant inside Chernobyl’s 2,600-square-kilometer exclusion zone — the uninhabited swath of land carved out after the 1986 disaster — the attack brought back traumatic memories many thought they had laid to rest. Klavdiia Omelchenko, now 59, was a 19-year-old textile worker living in Pripyat, the ghost plant town built for Chernobyl employees, when the 1986 explosion occurred. She slept through the blast, waking only to scattered rumors, and did not grasp the full scale of the disaster until weeks later, when she was evacuated with nothing more than a small bag of documents and cosmetics. Her home became part of the exclusion zone, and never having been able to build a new life elsewhere, she returned in 1993 to work in the plant’s cafeteria.

Decades of living with low-level radiation have become routine for Omelchenko, but the risks of war have proven far more terrifying. “It wasn’t as scary as now. Back then, at least, there was no bombing,” she explained. Though she developed persistent headaches after the 1986 accident and later underwent surgery for a precancerous condition, she shrugs off the daily contamination risk that comes with living and working inside the zone. “We grew up in it,” she said. “We don’t pay attention to it anymore.”

Completed in 2019 at a cost of $2.1 billion, the NSC is a massive arch-shaped engineering marvel large enough to enclose the entire Statue of Liberty. It was built to replace the crumbling, hastily constructed concrete sarcophagus the Soviet Union erected immediately after the 1986 disaster, designed to contain the 200 tons of highly radioactive fuel and debris left inside Reactor No. 4 for a projected 100 years, while enabling the safe dismantling of the old sarcophagus. The Chernobyl plant ceased all electricity production in 2000, when its final operational reactor was shut down, and the NSC was supposed to be the cornerstone of a decades-long global effort to finally neutralize the site’s ongoing threat.

That progress has been completely upended by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in 2022. Liudmyla Kozak, an engineer with more than 20 years of experience working at the plant, was on duty when Russian troops seized the Chernobyl site in the opening weeks of the invasion. For nearly three weeks, staff kept critical operations running while under armed guard, receiving radiation doses far exceeding safe limits for their rotations. “We had no hope we would make it out alive — it was really that scary,” Kozak recalled. Workers slept on office floors and desks, while Russian soldiers occupied key infrastructure, damaged and stole critical equipment, and stirred up radioactive dust by driving heavy military vehicles through contaminated areas and digging defensive trenches. Now, with the added damage from the drone strike, completing the decades-long cleanup has become even more challenging.

Serhii Bokov, who manages day-to-day operations for the NSC, was on duty early the morning of the 2025 strike when he felt the dull thud of the explosion ripple through the arch. He and his colleagues rushed outside, smelled smoke, but could not immediately locate the source. After a nearby military checkpoint confirmed the strike, firefighters arrived roughly 40 minutes later, and crews eventually found the fire smoldering through the structure’s outer membrane. Flames repeatedly re-ignited, and it took more than two weeks to fully extinguish the blaze.

“There was no feeling of fear, none at all. It was just a fire — something we practice in drills — only this time it was real,” Bokov said. “I didn’t think, honestly, that we could lose the entire arch.”

The strike did not fully penetrate the NSC’s outer layer, and the damage was confined to a section of the arch with low contamination. Radiation monitors recorded no spike in radiation levels beyond the structure, and no workers were injured in the attack. The breach has been temporarily patched, with the visible damage sealed from the outside, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has warned that the damage could cut significantly into the arch’s projected 100-year lifespan, compromising its core safety function.

Before the strike, crews were preparing to begin dismantling the old Soviet sarcophagus, a milestone decades in the making. That work is now on indefinite hold, and Bokov estimates the project will be delayed by at least 10 years. While the NSC can continue to operate in its damaged state for a limited period, the long-term stability of the crumbling sarcophagus beneath it remains a critical concern. “Everything depends on how quickly we can restore this and return to normal operations — and to preparing for dismantling,” Bokov noted.

Oleh Solonenko, head of a radiation safety shift at the plant, emphasized that the strike has shattered long-held assumptions about nuclear safety during armed conflict. “What once seemed unthinkable — strikes on nuclear facilities and other hazardous sites — has now become reality,” he said.

Moscow has denied intentionally targeting the Chernobyl plant, claiming the attack was staged by Ukrainian authorities. But environmental group Greenpeace Ukraine has echoed the IAEA’s warning, noting that without urgent repairs, the risk of the old sarcophagus collapsing increases dramatically. “It is difficult to comprehend the scale of the deadly, hazardous conditions inside the sarcophagus,” said Eric Schmieman, an engineer who spent years working at Chernobyl and assisted in designing the NSC. “There are tons of highly radioactive nuclear fuel, dust and debris. Now it is critical to find a way to restore the key functions of this facility.”

Today, yellow daffodils bloom beside wartime fortifications inside the exclusion zone, and workers in plain clothes, carrying radiation badges and special access permits, still pass through restricted checkpoints to keep the site stable. For the people who have dedicated their lives to containing Chernobyl’s legacy of disaster, the strike is a reminder that the site’s danger is not just a historical memory — it is an ongoing risk amplified by a war that has already upended decades of progress on nuclear safety.