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

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.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters Donald Trump is “frustrated” with the pace of talks and that Volodymyr Zelensky “seems to be moving in the wrong direction”.

Several sources have said proposals from Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff include not only recognising Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but accepting Russia’s control of the 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory it has gained in the war, ruling out Ukrainian membership of Nato and lifting Western sanctions.

Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg said on X that there were positive talks in London with Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and added: “It’s time to move forward on President Trump’s UKR-RU war directive: stop the killing, achieve peace, and put America First.”

Trump raised the pressure on Sunday when he said he hoped Moscow and Kyiv would make a deal this week to end the conflict.

At the heart of Wednesday’s talks was an attempt to establish what Kyiv could possibly accept after Witkoff presented proposals to a similar session in Paris last week.

Three diplomats said those proposals appeared to demand more concessions from Ukraine than Russia.

President Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky clashed publicly again on Wednesday, almost two months after their explosive bust-up in the Oval Office.

The US leader slated Zelensky for refusing to recognise Russia’s occupation of Crimea as part of a peace agreement – a position that appears to have scuttled a potentially crucial peace summit that was due to be held in London on Wednesday.

Trump’s vice president JD Vance said it was time for Russia and Ukraine to either agree to a US peace proposal “or for the United States to walk away from this process,” echoing a warning from Trump last week.

Speaking to reporters in India, Vance said the proposal called for freezing territorial lines “at some level close to where they are today” and a “long-term diplomatic settlement that hopefully will lead to long-term peace”.

“The only way to really stop the killing is for the armies to both put down their weapons, to freeze this thing,” he said.