Four children were among at least 14 people wounded in a Russian overnight air attack on Kyiv, officials said on Sunday, hours after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky renewed calls for more Patriot missile defense systems.
Two high-rise residential buildings were hit in the strikes, the mayor of Ukraine’s capital, Vitali Klitschko, said according to Reuters, including the second and third floors of a nine-story building in the Desnianskyi district.
“Everyone is receiving medical assistance, some have been hospitalized,” Kyiv’s military administration said on Telegram, without providing further detail, Reuters reported.
Air raid alerts were in place in Kyiv and surrounding districts for around an hour and a half before the air force called them off shortly after midnight on Sunday.
The magnitude of the attack and the extent of its damage was not immediately known. Klitschko did not confirm whether the buildings were directly hit or struck by falling debris from destroyed weapons.
Russian air defense systems destroyed one drone heading for Moscow, the city’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Sunday, according to Reuters.
Ukraine needs a constant pipeline of weapons from its allies to defend against Russian barrages of missiles and drones – often several hundred in one night. Repeated deadly attacks have underlined the shortfall in Ukraine’s air defenses.
An overnight attack Saturday killed at least four people in Ukraine, prompting Zelensky to ask for more Patriot missile systems “so that we can protect our cities from this horror.”
US President Donald Trump has been pushing for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia but those attempts have made little progress so far.
After Trump had a phone call with Putin last week, he was so convinced there was enough progress made that he announced he was heading soon to Budapest for an in-person summit.
Five days later, the summit was off and new sanctions on Moscow were on.
“It just it didn’t feel right to me,” Trump said Wednesday. “It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I canceled it.”
He struck a similarly pessimistic tone on Saturday while travelling on Air Force One to Malaysia where he is kicking off five days of whirlwind diplomacy in the region.
Trump told reporters he has no immediate plans to schedule a meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, insisting that any summit will have to wait until a potential peace deal between Russia and Ukraine seems achievable.
“I’m going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One while traveling to Asia. “I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a great relationship with Vladimir Putin, but this has been very disappointing,” he added.
The president again said he had expected resolving the conflict to be easier, noting, “I could say almost any one of the deals that I’ve already done, I thought would have been more difficult than Russia, than Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way.”
CNN’s Alejandra Jaramillo & Kosta Gak contributed reporting.
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