Russia launched an overnight barrage of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles at Kyiv, officials said Monday (September 2, 2024), as children prepared to return to school across Ukraine. Some pupils found classes cancelled because of damage from the attack.

Several series of explosions rocked the Ukrainian capital in the early hours. Debris from intercepted missiles and drones fell in every district of Kyiv, wounding three people and damaging two kindergartens, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said. City authorities reported multiple fires.

After more than 900 days of the war, Russia and Ukraine show no sign of letting up in the fight or moving closer to the negotiating table. Both sides are pursuing ambitious ground offensives, with the Ukrainians driving into Russia’s Kursk region and the Russian army pushing deeper into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine that is part of the industrial Donbas region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday (September 2, 2024) that Ukraine’s Kursk assault won’t prevent Russian forces from advancing in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian forces haven’t achieved their goal of diverting Russian troops from the fighting there, he said.

“The main task that the enemy set for themselves – to stop our offensive in Donbas – they haven’t achieved it,” Mr. Putin told school students during a trip to southern Siberia.

However, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last month that the aim of the Kursk incursion is to create a buffer zone that might prevent further attacks by Moscow across the border.

Mr. Putin predicted that Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, which began August 6, 2024, will fail and that subsequently Kyiv officials will want “to move to peace talks.”

Russia launched 35 missiles of various types and 26 Shahed drones at Ukraine overnight from Sunday (September 1, 2024) to Monday (September 2, 2024), the Ukrainian Air Force said. Nine ballistic missiles, 13 cruise missiles and 20 drones were downed, it said.

Residents of the capital hurried into the city’s bomb shelters.

Oksana Argunova, an 18-year-old student at a Kyiv high school, said that she was still shaking after the nighttime scare.

“I woke up, my neighbour was shouting: ‘Let’s go down (to the shelter), there are big explosions.’ We all ran,” Ms. Argunova told The Associated Press.

Monday (September 2, 2024) was the first day back at school after the summer vacation. In Ukraine, the day involves ceremonies and rituals. Students of all ages and often teachers or parents wear traditional costumes. Celebrations include concerts and dances.

Small groups of children and parents gathered outside a damaged Kyiv school as firefighters put out flames and removed rubble.

One 39-year-old mother turned up at the school with her 7-year-old daughter, Sophia, unaware it had been hit. It was Sophia’s first day at what for her was a new school, her mother said, after a frightening night.

“Of course, the child was scared. We hid in the bathroom, where it was relatively safe,” said the mother, who provided only her first name, Olena.

“Today is one of the most important days of the year for millions of our Ukrainian children, families and teachers,” Mr. Zelenskyy said on his Telegram channel.

“Ukraine is doing everything to give children as many opportunities as possible. And all our schools, all higher education institutions that are working today are proof of the resilience of our people and the strength of Ukraine,” he said.

Both sides are battering each other with regular long-range drone and missile strikes, sometimes launching more than 100 weapons in aerial attacks that suggest they are still pouring resources into weapon production.

Russian air defences intercepted 158 Ukrainian drones overnight, including two over Moscow and nine over the surrounding region, the Defense Ministry said.

The Ukrainian headquarters of the Danish humanitarian organization DanChurchAid was destroyed by missile fragments, its head Jonas Nøddekær said.

Elsewhere, 18 people were injured in a Sunday (September 1, 2024) evening strike on a centre for social and psychological rehabilitation of children and an orphanage in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Sumy, regional authorities said.

The regional prosecutor’s office said there were no children in the facility when the strike hit, but people in surrounding residential buildings suffered injuries, including six children.

The educational centre was partially destroyed and caught fire, and the buildings around it were damaged by the shockwave, State Emergency Services said.

An explosion also rang out in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, according to Ukrainian media. Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv region, confirmed an early morning strike on Kharkiv’s Industrialnyi district and said it set a residential building and several others on fire.

The U.K. Defense Ministry said Sunday (September 1, 2024) that Russian forces accelerated their advance on the key Donetsk stronghold Povkrosk over the past week and are likely within 10 km (6 miles) of the city.

There have been no significant changes elsewhere along the 1,000 km (more than 600-mile) front line, it said.

Mr. Zelenskyy confirmed on Saturday (August 24, 2024) the existence of the Palianytsia, named after a type of Ukrainian bread.
| Photo Credit: Reuters/Ukrainian Presidential Press Ser

Ukraine says it has a new homegrown long-range weapon that will allow it to strike deep into Russia without asking permission from allies.

With the characteristics of a missile and a drone, the “Palianytsia” was created due to urgent necessity, Ukrainian officials said, as Russia has dominated the skies since the outbreak of the war in February 2022. On Monday (August 26, 2024), a wave of Russian missiles and drones targeted Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure in the largest such attack in weeks.

“Defenders of life should have no restrictions on weapons, as long as Russia uses all kinds of its own weapons,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Telegram message following the attacks.

Mr. Zelenskyy confirmed on Saturday (August 24, 2024) the existence of the Palianytsia, named after a type of Ukrainian bread and a word so notoriously difficult to pronounce correctly that it was used to unmask suspected spies early in the war. The Ukrainian president called it “a new class” of weapon.

Saturday (August 24, 2024), which marked Ukraine’s 33rd anniversary of independence from the former Soviet Union, also saw the first use of the new weapon, targeting a Russian military installation in the occupied territory, officials said without providing details.

A Ukrainian military video hinted that its range is up to 700 km – on par with the U.S.-supplied ATACMS. It showed a map with various airfields, including Russia’s Savasleyka air base, which lies within that range, adding that the Palianytsia can reach at least 20 Russian airfields.

The United States and other Western allies provide long-range weapons to Ukraine but restrict it from launching them deep into Russia for fear of escalating the war. Ukraine can target the border regions but wants to go deeper to attack Russia’s military infrastructure.

The Institute for the Study of War said Russia was “leveraging sanctuary space in deep rear areas.” It estimated at least 250 militarily significant targets in Russia were within range of the ATACMS missiles, but current restrictions allow Ukraine to strike only 20 of them.

Ukraine’s technology minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, told The Associated Press in his first interview about the new weapon that the next step was to scale up the production.

“I think this will be a game changer because we will be able to strike where Russia doesn’t expect it today,” he said.

Mr. Fedorov declined to elaborate on the range or current supply, citing security reasons, but said that he has been involved in the projects for developing domestic missiles since the end of 2022.

Ukraine’s battlefields have become a deadly testing lab for new weapons and new adaptations of old ones. Both Ukrainian and Russian forces have rigged off-the-shelf equipment with explosives and military-grade infrared cameras; Russia has retrofitted Soviet-era unguided bombs with GPS harnesses; and Ukraine’s underwater drones have crippled Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

But the new weapon has been a long-term goal of Ukraine. One of the specialists involved in the long-range missile project said it was “a completely new development, from scratch” that began about 18 months ago.

“This is not an extension of an old Soviet project,” said the specialist, speaking on condition of anonymity to safeguard the project’s secrecy. “The missile has a solid-fuel booster that accelerates it, followed by a jet engine,” the specialist said.

Ukraine says its inability to fight back against Russian long-range weapons has deadly consequences. Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi said Russia has launched 9,627 long-range missiles and Ukraine’s defence shot down only a quarter of them, and that more than half the Russian targets were civilian.

The specialist and Mr. Fedorov said each missile costs less than $1 million, and the military is turning to the private sector to bring down production costs further. “The private market generates solutions incredibly quickly,” the minister said.

“As of this year, private companies have become the main suppliers of drones for the Ukrainian army, including those now striking inside Russia and the underwater ones that have repeatedly struck the Russian Black Sea fleet,” said Mr. Fedorov.

“All types of missiles will be available in Ukraine,” he said. “If we have our own weapons like this, we will feel more independent and confident.”

Mr. Fedorov added that he believed Russia’s vast size could also be its vulnerability.

“It’s impossible to produce enough air defence systems to protect such a large territory,” he said. “For us, this opens up the possibility of operating deep behind enemy lines.”

Kyiv:

President Volodymyr Zelensky touted a newly developed Ukrainian “drone missile” on Saturday that he said would take the war back to Russia and scornfully derided Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a “sick old man from Red Square”.

As Ukraine marked 33 years of post-Soviet independence, Mr Zelensky said the new weapon, Palianytsia, was faster and more powerful than the domestically made drones that Kyiv has so far used to fight back against Russia, striking its oil refineries and military airfields.

“Our enemy will … know what the Ukrainian way for retaliation is. Worthy, symmetrical, long-ranged,” he said.

Mr Zelensky said the new class of Ukrainian weapon had been used for a successful strike on a target in Russia, but did not say where.

He used derisive language to describe Russia’s 71-year-old president and the nuclear rhetoric coming out of Moscow.

“A sick old man from Red Square who constantly threatens everyone with the red button will not dictate any of his red lines to us,” he said in a video on the Telegram messaging app.

Russia, which has attacked Ukraine with many thousands of missiles and drones since it invaded in February 2022, has decried Ukraine’s drone attacks as terrorism. Moscow’s troops are advancing in Ukraine’s east and occupy 18% of the country.

Mr Zelensky has been pressing Kyiv’s allies to allow him to use Western weapons deeper in Russian territory such as to strike airbases used by Russian warplanes that pound Ukraine with missiles and glide bombs.

“I want to stress once more that our new weapon decisions, including Palianytsia, is our realistic way to act while some of our partners are unfortunately delaying decisions,” Mr Zelensky told a news conference.

Ukrainians say the word “Palianytsia”, a type of Ukrainian bread, is too difficult to pronounce for Russians and it has been used – sometimes humorously – during the war as a way to tell Ukrainians and Russians apart.

“It will be very difficult for Russia, difficult to even pronounce what exactly has hit it,” Mr Zelensky said of the drone missile.

TOP COMMANDER PROMOTED

In a decree, Mr Zelensky promoted his top commander, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, to the rank of general, a tacit gesture of praise after Ukraine’s lightning cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region launched on Aug. 6.

Cast by Russia as an escalation and major provocation, Ukraine’s incursion has captured more than 90 settlements in the Kursk region according to Kyiv, the biggest invasion of Russia since World War Two.

Speaking at a joint news conference with Poland’s and Lithuania’s leaders, Mr Zelensky told reporters the operation had in part been a preventive move to stop Russian plans to capture the northern city of Sumy.

Apart from capturing prisoners of war and creating a “buffer zone”, Mr Zelensky said the operation had other objectives that he could not disclose publicly.

Independence Day has surged in importance for Ukrainians during the invasion, which has spurred widespread patriotic sentiment.

This year the public holiday took place after the US and German embassies issued warnings of a heightened risk of Russian missile and drone attacks across the country.

There had been no major strikes as of 1800 local time, but the air raid siren sounded in Kyiv late afternoon.

To mark the date, Mr Zelensky ratified the Rome Statute, paving the way for Ukraine to join the International Criminal Court, one of many steps needed to join the European Union, accession to which Kyiv sees as a priority.

He also signed legislation banning the activities of religious groups linked to Russia, creating a legal instrument for the government to ban a branch of the Orthodox Church seen as linked to Russia.

Ukraine and Russia also said they had each secured the release of 115 prisoners of war in an exchange. The Russian Defence Ministry said its freed servicemen had been captured during Ukraine’s attack in the Kursk region.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Tokyo:

India will have more contacts with Ukraine and Russia going forward as such engagements by countries talking to both sides are important to resolve their conflict, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Monday, days after it emerged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi may visit Kyiv next month.

Mr Jaishankar said India’s position has been that a solution to the conflict will not emerge from the battlefield, and cautioned that it could be “fatalistic” to allow the situation to take its course and wait for events in some other parts of the world to provide some help to end the crisis.

“We do believe that we should be more active there,” he said during an interactive session at Japan National Press Club.

Mr Jaishankar is on a three-day visit to Japan.

“I can reasonably expect that there will be more contacts between us and Ukraine and between us and Russia as well,” he said, replying to a question on reports of Prime Minister Modi’s likely visit to Kyiv next month.

Declining to give a specific answer, the external affairs minister added: “We, like any government, make our positions known at the right time through the right channels.” 

Mr Jaishankar said more needs to be done to find a way to end the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

“Our feeling today is that more needs to be done (and) that we should not resign ourselves to the continuation of the current state of conflict and say ‘let this take its own course and let us wait for events in other parts of the world to provide some kind of solution’,” he said.

“That to our mind would be fatalistic,” he noted.

Mr Jaishankar said considering the gravity of the situation, it is important for countries who are in touch with both Russia and Ukraine as not many are actually talking to the two sides.

The external affairs minister also referred to Prime Minister Modi’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Italy last month.

“A few weeks later, we were in Moscow for our annual summit. So he (Modi) had a chance to discuss with President (Vladimir) Putin at very great length. And I myself have kept in touch with my (Ukrainian) counterpart Dmytro Kuleba,” the external affairs minister said.

Mr Jaishankar said India believes it is important for everybody to do whatever they can to see if in some way something improves and something moves out of the battlefield into the conference table.

“We believe that there must be a return to dialogue and diplomacy,” he said.

“From the very beginning, we had the view that the use of force does not resolve problems between countries. In the last two-and-half years, this conflict has deepened, it has cost lives, it has done economic damage; it has had global consequences,” he said.

“I mean look at parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, it has actually impacted other societies. It has created food shortages, it has raised energy costs, it has created a fertilizer supply problem, it has contributed to global inflation and in some cases, it has even directly triggered economic crises in countries,” he said.

“It is very serious as it is. Its implications in a globalised world are even more serious. We recognised that,” Mr Jaishankar said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Moscow:

The Kremlin said Monday that a Kyiv-led international peace summit on Ukraine that it was not invited to produced “zero” results.

Officials from more than 90 countries gathered in Switzerland this weekend, backing Ukraine’s independence but leaving key questions of how to end the conflict unresolved.

“If we talk about the results of this meeting, then they come down to zero,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

A final document was backed by a vast majority of countries attending the summit, but several countries did not sign it, including Saudi Arabia, India and the United Arab Emirates.

“Many countries understood the lack of perspective of any serious discussion without the presence of our country,” Peskov said.

He said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “still open to dialogue and serious discussion.”

Putin last week said Moscow would only join peace talks if Ukraine gave up four of its regions, effectively demanding that it surrender.

The Kremlin launched its full-scale offensive against Ukraine on February 24th, 2022.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)