Russia threatens strikes on Kyiv defence sites, urges foreigners to leave

Russia urged foreign nationals on Monday to leave Kyiv before it launches a "series of systematic strikes" against defence targets in Ukraine's capital, a day after one of its heaviest bombardments of the city since the start of the war.

Russia's foreign ministry said the strikes were a response to what Moscow says was a deliberate drone strike on a student dorm in the Russian-controlled Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine. Ukraine's military denied the Russian accusations and said it had struck an elite drone command unit in the area.

"Under these circumstances, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are launching a series of systematic strikes against Ukrainian military-industrial complex enterprises in Kyiv," the ministry said in a statement.

The strikes will include specific sites involved in the design and manufacture of drones as well as decision-making centres and command posts, it said.

In Kyiv, rescuers worked on Monday to deal with the aftermath of Sunday's strikes, which authorities said had killed two people and injured 91.

Moscow fired an Oreshnik hypersonic missile near Kyiv - its third use of the nuclear-capable weapon in the more than four-year-old war.

Around 300 sites across Kyiv were damaged, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. One of the sites was a newly opened museum commemorating the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, which was badly damaged in Sunday's strikes.

"As of today, there is not a single room in the National Chornobyl Museum that has not been destroyed," the museum's director Vitalina Martynovska told Reuters.

More than 70 foreign diplomats paid their respects to the victims of the strikes in Kyiv, visiting a heavily damaged neighbourhood in Lukyanivka on Monday.

France's ambassador to Ukraine, Gael Veyssiere, noted that ordinary people had returned to work on Monday and were going about their daily lives.

"It's a way to demonstrate resilience and I think it's extremely important that we, around the world, we would support that," Veyssiere told Reuters.

ATTACKS IN RUSSIA, UKRAINE

Meanwhile, Ukraine continued its own attacks against Russian infrastructure and industrial assets. In Russia's Belgorod region, one man was killed and another injured in a missile and drone attack that also cut power and water supplies, local authorities said on Telegram.

Four people, including two teenagers, were killed in the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian town of Horlivka, its mayor Ivan Prikhodko said on Monday on Telegram, blaming a Ukrainian attack.

In Ukraine, two people were killed and 16 wounded in Russian shelling, missile and drone attacks in the southern Kherson region over the past 24 hours, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram on Monday.

In a missile attack on Monday on the town of Derhachi near Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-biggest city, two people were killed and more than 20 injured, officials said.

A further 14 people were wounded, including a boy of 6, in the southeastern Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk, officials said. Emergency services said a nine-storey apartment building was hit by a drone attack in the town of Pavlohrad and posted photos of thick, black smoke billowing from the building.

Reuters could not independently verify the reports. Russia and Ukraine deny deliberately targeting civilians since Russia invaded its neighbour in February 2022.

U.S. mediation efforts have so far failed to broker an end to the war. Both sides have accused the other of seeking to escalate the conflict, and Ukraine plans to send reinforcements to its northern regions to counter what it believes are Russian plans for a new offensive.

On Friday, Zelenskiy said diplomatic efforts to end the fighting should be reinvigorated.