Just days after high-stakes talks between top envoys of former US President Donald Trump and officials in both Moscow and Kyiv failed to deliver a lasting ceasefire, Russia launched a new wave of air attacks across Ukraine on Tuesday, killing at least five civilians in Kyiv and partially destroying the headquarters of a major Ukrainian television channel.
The daytime drone strike targeted the building housing “We are Ukraine” TV channel in the heart of Ukraine’s capital, while the outlet’s journalists were in the middle of a live broadcast. President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that at least five people were wounded in the attack, and official photos shared by Zelensky show a large section of the multi-story building collapsed after the impact.
Ukrainian emergency services reported that the fatalities from overnight and Tuesday’s daytime strikes across Kyiv climbed to five by the afternoon. The overnight wave of missile and drone attacks killed three residents and injured 25 more, damaging multiple residential structures including a five-story apartment block in Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district. Fires also broke out at multiple vehicle parking lots in the Podilskyi district. As air raid sirens wailed across the city, thousands of Kyiv residents followed their long-established wartime routine, fleeing to underground metro stations to wait out the attacks, a scene that has become repeated across the capital since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
This attack comes on the heels of a three-day tentative agreement between Moscow and Kyiv to pause strikes on one another’s capitals, arranged to allow Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to visit both capitals for peace talks over the weekend. Zelensky condemned the drone strike on the Ukrainian media outlet as an deliberate act of aggression against independent journalism, calling it “a new page in Russian degradation.”
“Today, Russia carried out a strike on the media, journalists. Russia must be stopped, and this is possible only through joint efforts,” Zelensky said in a renewed appeal to Ukraine’s allies across Europe, the United States and the broader international community for continued military and diplomatic support.
Analysts from BBC Verify have found that Kyiv is now facing more daily air raid alerts than at any point since the start of Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion, marking a sharp escalation in air attacks on the capital in recent weeks.
In a tit-for-tat exchange, Ukraine launched its own drone strike on the Russian city of Saratov overnight, damaging multiple civilian buildings, according to Saratov regional governor Roman Busargin. No immediate fatalities were reported from the Ukrainian side of the attack.
The weekend talks between Trump’s envoys and leadership on both sides ended with no major breakthroughs, despite optimistic hints from the US delegation. Following the meetings, Zelensky warned that he expects the full-scale war to continue through the coming winter, and said he saw no indication that Russia is prepared to make meaningful concessions to end the conflict.
In Moscow, senior Putin adviser Yuriy Ushakov told reporters that the US envoys were briefed on what Russia called “significant advances made by the Russian armed forces” on the front lines, and reaffirmed that the Kremlin would not back down until it achieves all of its stated war objectives, which include forcing Ukraine to cede large swathes of sovereign territory to Russia.
Witkoff, one of the lead US envoys, only said that “substantive progress was made” during the talks, declining to share any further details on what topics were discussed or what agreements were reached. Zelensky confirmed that the two sides had agreed to schedule a follow-up meeting in the near future for officials from Ukraine, the United States and Europe to continue negotiations. He also repeated his call for a direct trilateral meeting with Russia and the United States to discuss terms for a lasting ceasefire.