Russia hits Ukraine's Kharkiv with deadly night-time barrage of drones
A concentrated, nine-minute Russian drone attack on Ukraine's second-largest city Kharkiv in the middle of the night killed three people and injured 64, including nine children, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.
The overnight attack followed Russia's two biggest air assaults of the war on Ukraine this week, part of intensified bombardments that Moscow says are retaliatory measures for Kyiv's recent attacks in Russia.
Elsewhere, two southern Ukrainian regions, Mykolaiv and Kherson, were left without electricity on Wednesday after Russian forces attacked an energy facility, the governors said.
Kharkiv, in Ukraine's northeast, withstood Russia's full-scale advance in the early days of the war but has since been a regular target of drone, missile and guided aerial bomb assaults.
The intense strikes by 17 drones on Kharkiv sparked fires in 15 units of a five-storey apartment building and caused other damage in the city close to the Russian border, the city's mayor Ihor Terekhov said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The South African
12 hours ago
- The South African
Donald Trump unveils website for $5 million US residency 'golden visa'
President Donald Trump touted a new website for his planned $5 million (R89 million) US residency permit on Wednesday, saying the waiting list for the golden visa has opened on 'Thousands have been calling and asking how they can sign up to ride a beautiful road in gaining access to the Greatest Country and Market anywhere in the World,' Trump wrote in a social media post. Donald Trump unveiled the first such visa aboard Air Force One in April, holding a golden prototype that bore his face and promising the special permit would probably be available 'in less than two weeks.' The visas are not available yet, but the website announced on Wednesday allows interested parties to submit their name, desired visa and email address under a header that says 'The Trump Card is Coming.' Trump previously said the new visa, a high-price version of the traditional green card, would bring in job creators and could be used to reduce the US national deficit. The announcement comes as deportation raids are being ramped up across the country, prompting protests, and as Trump's administration faces ongoing lawsuits and accusations of rights violations over its anti-immigration blitz. Donald Trump has said the new card would be a route to highly prized US citizenship. He said in February that his administration hoped to sell 'maybe a million' of the cards and did not rule out that Russian oligarchs may be eligible. Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1 Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news. By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse
TimesLIVE
17 hours ago
- TimesLIVE
Trump is receptive to contacts with North Korean leader, White House says
President Donald Trump would welcome communications with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after having had friendly relations with Kim during his first term, the White House said on Wednesday. 'The president remains receptive to correspondence with Kim Jong Un,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. She was responding to a report by Seoul-based NK News, a website that monitors North Korea, that the North's delegation at the UN in New York had repeatedly refused to accept a letter from Trump to Kim. Trump and Kim held three summits during Trump's 2017-2021 first term and exchanged a number of what Trump called 'beautiful' letters. In June 2019, Trump briefly stepped into North Korea from the demilitarised zone with South Korea. Little progress was made, however, at reining in North Korea's nuclear programme, and Trump acknowledged in March that Pyongyang is a 'nuclear power'. Since Trump's first-term summitry with Kim ended, North Korea has shown no interest in returning to talks. The attempts at rapprochement come after the election in South Korea of a new president, Lee Jae-myung, who has pledged to reopen dialogue with North Korea. As a gesture of engagement on Wednesday Lee suspended South Korean loudspeakers blasting music and messages into the North at the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) along their shared border. Analysts say, however, that engaging North Korea will likely be more difficult for both Lee and Trump than it was in the US president's first term. Since then North Korea has significantly expanded its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes, and developed close ties with Russia through direct support for Moscow's war in Ukraine, to which Pyongyang has provided both troops and weaponry. Kim said in a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country will always stand with Moscow, state media reported on Thursday.
TimesLIVE
17 hours ago
- TimesLIVE
Ukraine brings home bodies of 1,212 soldiers killed in war with Russia
Image: Presidential adviser and head of delegation for peace talks with Ukraine Vladimir Medinsky via Telegram/Handout via REUTERS Ukraine has brought home the bodies of 1,212 soldiers killed in the war with Russia, the Kyiv officials responsible for exchanging prisoners of war said on Wednesday. In Moscow, Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky said Ukraine for its part had returned 27 bodies of Russian soldiers. 'As a result of the repatriation activities ... the bodies of 1,212 fallen defenders have been returned to Ukraine,' Kyiv's prisoner exchange co-ordination committee said on the Telegram messaging app. It released photos from the scene showing personnel of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) at an undisclosed location, walking past several refrigerated trucks. Some trucks were marked with emblems of 'On the Shield', a Ukrainian organisation involved in the retrieval and evacuation of military dead. Kyiv and Moscow reached agreement at their most recent round of talks last week on a large-scale exchange of corpses of war dead, though the deal was marred by wrangling over its implementation. On Sunday, Medinsky said Ukraine had postponed taking the first 1,212 bodies. Russian officials also said that refrigerated trucks loaded with corpses waited for five days at the border before Ukraine accepted them. Ukraine's co-ordination body said a deal had been reached on repatriating bodies but the date had not been finalised, and accused Russia of unilateral and uncoordinated actions. On June 2, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia wanted to transfer 6,000 bodies back to Ukraine, but that only about 15% of them had been identified. 'We already had a moment once when they transferred bodies to us and were also transferring bodies of Russian dead soldiers,' Zelensky said at a briefing. The 1,212 bodies will now be transferred to experts of Ukraine's interior ministry, law enforcement agencies and the health ministry who will try to ascertain their identities as soon as possible, the prisoner exchange co-ordination body said. On Monday, Russia and Ukraine exchanged dozens of prisoners of war under the age of 25, as well as severely wounded and ill prisoners on Tuesday, in emotional homecoming scenes, the first step in a series of planned swaps that could become the biggest of the war triggered by Russia's 2022 invasion. Russia and Ukraine will exchange more seriously wounded and ill prisoners of war on Thursday, Medinsky said. Fighting has raged on meanwhile with Russia saying on Monday its forces had taken control of more territory in Ukraine's east-central region of Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv saying Moscow had launched its largest drone attack of the war.
