Ukraine-Russia war latest: Nine dead and 70 injured as Putin hits Kyiv with massive missile and drone strike

Russia launched 215 drones and missiles in a massive overnight attack on Ukraine, Kyiv’s air force said.

Air force units shot down 48 missiles and 64 drones, while 68 drones were redirected by electronic warfare, the air force said in a post on Telegram.

Volodymyr Zelensky will cancel part of his programme in South Africa and return to Ukraine following a massive Russian attack on Kyiv, which has killed nine and injured dozens more, with many feared to be under the rubble.

Mr Zelensky said in a Telegram post that he will fly back to Kyiv after meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

The Ukrainian leader had hoped to recruit further South African support in efforts to end his country’s war with Russia, which is now in its fourth year.

Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha will conduct all meetings in South Africa to inform leaders about the situation in Ukraine, Mr Zelensky said.

A man has been pulled alive from the ruins of a destroyed house in Kyiv following the massive Russian drone and missile attack overnight, emergency services have said.

Reported to be under 30 years old, the survivor was trapped for more than six hours before he was found under the rubble in the Sviatoshynskyi district, Kyiv’s State Emergency Service spokesperson Pavlo Petrov told Ukrainian media.

“Rescue workers have found a man alive. He is reported to be under 30 years old. He had been trapped under the rubble for over six hours.”

The man was conscious, which allowed rescuers to locate him, Mr Petrov said according to Ukrainska Pravda.

“We took a moment of silence, and he responded to the rescue workers’ voice,” Mr Petrov said.

The emergency service said on Telegram that the “search is continuing for people under rubble” following last night’s “destruction”.

After Volodymyr Zelensky pushed back against the idea of ceding Crimean territory to Russia, relations between Kyiv and Washington look close to collapsing once again following Donald Trump’s response.

“There is nothing to talk about. This violates our Constitution. This is our territory, the territory of the people of Ukraine,” Mr Zelensky told reporters in a briefing in Kyiv – comments which the US president subsequently described as “very harmful” to peace talks.

Writing on Truth Social, the US president hit back at Kyiv’s refusal to accept Russian control of the Crimean peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

“Nobody is asking Zelensky to recognise Crimea as Russian Territory but, if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?” he wrote on social media.

Mr Zelensky can choose peace or “he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country”, Mr Trump said, adding that his comments “will do nothing but prolong the ‘killing field,’ and nobody wants that!”

Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons if it faces Western aggression, Moscow’s top security official, Sergei Shoigu, told Tass state news agency on Thursday.

Mr Shoigu’s comments come as US president Donald Trump and vice president JD Vance warn that Washington could walk away from trying to negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine if there is no progress on a deal soon.

The former Russian defence minister – before moving to head its powerful security council in a government reshuffle last year – cited amendments to Moscow’s nuclear doctrine approved by president Vladimir Putin last November.

Under the new terms, Russia could consider a nuclear strike in response to a conventional attack on Russia or its ally Belarus that “created a critical threat to their sovereignty and (or) their territorial integrity.”

“…in the event of foreign states committing unfriendly actions that pose a threat to the sovereignty and territory integrity of the Russian Federation, our country considers it legitimate to take symmetric and asymmetric measures necessary to suppress such actions and prevent their recurrence,” Mr Shoigu added.

Ukrainian officials are reacting to the devastating attack on Kyiv overnight, which included both missiles and drones and triggered fires, smashed buildings and buried residents under rubble in at least four regions of the capital.

The attack comes at a critical moment in the war, that began with Russia’s invasion in 2022, as both Kyiv and Moscow are under pressure from the United States to show progress towards a peace deal.

“Yesterday’s Russian maximalist demands for Ukraine to withdraw from its regions, combined with these brutal strikes, show that Russia, not Ukraine, is the obstacle to peace. Moscow, not Kyiv, is where pressure should be applied,” Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said on X.

Interior minister Ihor Klymenko said that apart from Kyiv and the surrounding region, seven other regions were under the “mass” attack.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city in the northeast, endured overnight waves of Russian missiles and drones, mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram.

Terekhov said the city was attacked 14 times with drones and 10 times with missiles.

Multi-storey residential buildings, a city polyclinic, a school building, private yards, industrial enterprises, and a hotel complex were damaged and one person was hospitalised, he said.

More details are emerging from Kyiv, where rescue teams are still working to reach people trapped under the rubble and take dead bodies away.

Oksana Bilozir, a student, was receiving medical care for a head injury near one impact site. She said that she heard a loud explosion after the air alarm blared and began to grab her things to flee to a shelter when another blast caused her home’s walls to crumble and the lights to go off.

“I honestly don’t even know how this will all end, it’s very scary,” said Bilozir, referring to the war against Russia’s invasion.

“I only believe that if we can stop them on the battlefield, then that’s it. No diplomacy works here.”More fires were reported in the Shevchenkivsky and Holosiivskyi districts.

Anastasiia Zhuravlova, 33, a mother of two, was sheltering in a basement after multiple blasts damaged her home. Her family was sleeping when the first explosion shattered their windows and sent kitchen appliances flying in the air. Shards of glass rained down on them as they rushed to take cover in the corridor.

“After that we came to the shelter because it was scary and dangerous at home,” she said.

An overnight Russian combined missile and drone attack triggered fires, smashed buildings and buried residents under rubble in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, killing nine people and injuring more than 70, the State Emergency Service said this morning.

Six children were reported to be among the injured.”There has been destruction. The search is continuing for people under rubble,” the State Emergency Service wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

The most serious incident was at an apartment building destroyed in the Sviatoshynskyi district west of the city centre.

Pictures posted on Telegram showed rescue teams working with floodlights, moving cautiously through piles of rubble and clambering up ladders extended along the facades of buildings. Police were calling from apartment to apartment to determine whether residents were safe.

Rescue teams, the emergency service said, were operating at 13 sites in the capital with climbing specialists and sniffer dogs. Forty fires had broken out.

“Mobile telephones are heard ringing beneath rubble. The search will continue until it become clear that they have got everyone,” it said.

Fires had broken out in garages, administrative buildings and falling metal fragments had struck vehicles.

An air raid alert was in effect in the capital for six hours.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city in the northeast, endured two overnight waves of Russian missiles, injuring two people and smashing windows, Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram.

There was also damage in Zhytomyr region, west of Kyiv, where emergency services said Russian forces launched a repeat strike on rescue teams attending a fire, injuring one worker.

Ukrainian state railway Ukrzaliznytsia said that railway infrastructure had come under attack and two railway workers were hurt.

In Kyiv and Kharkiv regions the shelling damaged track and administrative and technical buildings, but trains were operating normally.