Six killed and a blood transfusion centre destroyed in overnight Russian missile strikes; Kyiv’s Mother Ukraine statue has its Soviet-era hammer-and-sickle emblem replaced
A multi-wave overnight assault on Ukraine – said to be in retaliation for successful strikes against Russian naval vessels – killed six people and destroyed a blood transfusion centre. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned the “guided air bomb” strike against the medical facility as a war crime of “beasts”.
Despite the strikes, Zelenskiy said Ukraine was seeing “significant results” from US and German air defence systems. Ukraine had shot down a significant part of Russia’s attacks over the past week, which included 65 missiles of various kinds and 178 assault drones, including 87 Shaheds, he said.
The Chonhar bridge to the occupied Crimean peninsula was damaged by a missile strike, the Moscow-installed governor said. Another of the three road links between Crimea and Russian-occupied parts of mainland Ukraine, near the town of Henichesk, was shelled and a civilian driver wounded, a Moscow-appointed official said.
A hostile drone was destroyed by Russian air defences as it approached Moscow on Sunday morning, the city’s mayor said. The capital’s Vnukovo airport temporarily suspended flights.
Russia has said its forces struck military airbases in the Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions in western Ukraine and that “all targets were hit”. The deputy governor of the Khmelnytskyi region, Serhiy Tiurin, said on Sunday that a military airfield in Starokostiantyniv was among the targets. He said most of the missiles were shot down but explosions had damaged several houses, a cultural institution and the bus station, and a fire had broken out at a grain silo.
The Mother Ukraine statue in Kyiv, one of the nation’s most recognisable landmarks, has lost its hammer-and-sickle symbol after officials replaced the Soviet-era emblem with the country’s trident coat of arms. The move is part of a wider shift to reclaim Ukraine’s cultural identity from the Communist past.
A weekend conference in Saudi Arabia of senior officials from some 40 countries including the US, China and India – part of a diplomatic push by Ukraine to build support beyond its core Western backers – ended with no concrete action beyond a commitment to further consultations. Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said the discussions had been very productive, but did not give details.
