KYIV — Nearly 150 Russian drones descended on Ukraine early Sunday, rattling Kyiv awake just after midnight to the boom of explosions, which killed three people and injured 10 — deepening tensions ahead of ceasefire talks continuing this week in Saudi Arabia.
Among the victims were a father and his 5-year-old daughter, and an 80-year-old woman who neighbors said could be heard screaming for help after her ninth-floor apartment caught fire. The fatalities were the first in Kyiv in more than two months, and on Sunday, the Ukrainian flag atop the 335-foot Motherland Monument was lowered to half-mast as a symbol of mourning.
“New solutions are needed, new pressure on Moscow, so that such strikes and this war stop,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on Telegram on Sunday.
In preparation for technical talks this week in Saudi Arabia, Zelensky’s office has been preparing a list of civilian infrastructure — including ports and railways — to be spared from future strikes. While Ukraine has supported a comprehensive ceasefire without preconditions, as proposed by the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin last week agreed only to a narrow proposal barring strikes on energy infrastructure. In recent days, both sides have accused the other of violating the limited agreement, threatening to derail the ongoing negotiations.
After Russian drones struck the Ukrainian port city of Odessa on Friday, then its Zaporizhzhia region on Saturday — killing a family of three, leaving the oldest daughter the only survivor — Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Kyiv of having a “lack of desire to achieve peace” and blamed Ukraine for the explosion of an oil depot in Russia’s Kuban region and an attack on a gas metering station in Sudzha, a town in western Russia seized last year by Ukraine and recently retaken by Russia.
Zakharova’s comments came Saturday as Czech President Petr Pavel was on an official visit to Kyiv, where he toured Okhmatdyt Hospital — a children’s hospital struck by a Russian missile in July — with Ukraine’s health minister, learning about the impact of the war on the country’s medical infrastructure, which the health minister said has seen 1,984 medical buildings damaged and 301 destroyed.
On Sunday, rescue workers amassed outside one of the apartment buildings struck in that morning’s attack on Kyiv. The roof was scorched black and gouged open to the sky, insulation tufting from the walls. Men cut tarp to cover the broken windows, and the Red Cross poured tea and plated sugar cookies for residents.
Up several flights of stairs, where broken glass crunched underfoot, Vasyl Komakov, 49, watched water from the fire hoses upstairs drip from the ceiling and collect in brown puddles on the floor. His mattress was thrown against the wall, and in the living room, a cone-shaped indent of concrete jutted from above the window — the strike site.
“We will survive it,” said Komakov, who’d grown up in the apartment and inherited it from his parents. “The good thing is my arms and legs are still attached. … In the evening, this is all going to hit me.”
He knew his upstairs neighbor in apartment 36 hadn’t been as lucky. Though 80 years old, she had continued working as a cleaner at a nearby children’s center — maintaining her independence, even though she sometimes relied on her neighbors’ help to navigate her cellphone or the television remote.
Her apartment had been directly hit — smoke painting the front hallway black, possessions incinerated past the point of recognition. Even her mattress had been reduced to bedsprings.
“Everyone tried to open the door, but it was burning like crazy,” said her neighbor Olena Zhilina, 57, who’d been tasked with calling the woman’s son in Sumy with the news.
She acknowledged the morning’s grief — but it was also just another day of war.
“What will happen if I sit down now and cry?” she said, pausing to pick up her ringing cellphone, another neighbor calling with news.
Outside, rescue workers continued to sweep up all that had been shattered.