A Russian ballistic missile attack on Kyiv killed at least nine people and wounded 23 others, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said, as fresh friction emerged between Kyiv and Washington over air defence production and satellite-guided strikes.
The strikes hit the capital early on Saturday, with more than a dozen explosions heard and residents told to stay in shelters. «Fires and destruction occurred in five districts of the capital,» the emergency service said in a statement. In the Darnytsky district, seven people were killed and 14 wounded, with multiple buildings and vehicles damaged. Two more people were killed and eight wounded in the Solomiansky district, where a five-storey residential building was hit. Emergency crews had rescued 105 people by Saturday morning.
A 75-year-old resident, Kateryna Kravchenko, described the damage to her apartment in the capital. «Everything was smashed, the windows, everything,» she said. «I can barely stand. I don’t know how I’m going to get through all this.»
The attack came on day 1,620 of Russia’s full-scale invasion. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pressed Washington to help him secure permission from Elon Musk to use the Starlink satellite service for guiding strikes inside Russia. According to a person familiar with the matter, Zelenskyy made the request directly to Donald Trump during an Oval Office meeting this week and later discussed it with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Trump did not commit to the request. Musk currently allows Starlink use inside Ukraine, including in Russian-occupied areas, but restricts the service inside Russia.
The missile attack also coincided with a fresh retreat by Trump on the question of allowing Ukraine to manufacture its own Patriot air defence interceptors. Zelenskyy had said after meeting Trump earlier this week that the US president agreed to license production of the missiles in Ukraine. But during a cabinet meeting at Camp David, Trump told reporters that handing over the underlying Patriot technology was «a hard thing» to do.
Asked whether he was ready to grant Kyiv a licence to build Patriots domestically, a step he had suggested at a Nato summit in Turkey, Trump said: «We have not agreed to that. We’re talking about it, but it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology.» He added that such transfers carried their own risks: «People that you give that technology to, they can some day turn on you. You know that is possible.»
In Kyiv, several thousand people rallied on Friday to protest against Zelenskyy’s decision to dismiss Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Fedorov, who took charge of the wartime ministry in January, is widely credited with driving military innovation in Ukraine’s war against Russia. He was removed in a surprise government reshuffle in mid-July and has refused to accept another post. Protesters have gathered near the presidential office demanding his reinstatement.
Separately, Russia’s main grain lobby group warned on Friday that Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian ships and ports could bring grain exports across the Black Sea to a halt, pushing up prices and threatening hunger in Africa and the Middle East. Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter and Ukraine is also a major agricultural exporter; the two countries have struck each other’s facilities and vessels in the Black Sea in recent weeks, driving wheat prices higher. The Russian Union of Grain Exporters and Producers said the shipping disruption «poses a direct threat to global food security».
The founder and chief executive of the Russian online retailer Wildberries, Tatyana Kim, also complained on Friday that Ukrainian drone attacks on its sites amounted to «acts of terrorism» against civilians. Ukraine has attacked more than a dozen Wildberries sites since 18 July in a bid to disrupt operations of the company, a vendor to the Russian war effort and a linchpin of Russia’s consumer economy.
