Russian strikes kill nine in Ukraine and burn a historic Kyiv cathedral
A large overnight Russian barrage on Ukraine killed at least nine people and damaged a UNESCO-listed cathedral in Kyiv , Ukrainian officials said. Russia fired dozens of Shahed drones and at least 15 ballistic missiles at the capital alone, wounding about 20 people, among them a child and a pregnant woman, and cutting power to roughly 140,000 households.
The 11th-century Dormition Cathedral inside the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex took direct hits, with some 800 square meters set ablaze. The Oleksandr Dovzhenko national film studios were also heavily damaged, destroying a costume archive of about 100,000 garments. In Kharkiv, five emergency workers were killed in a “double-tap” strike — a follow-on hit on the same site as they fought a fire — a pattern that raises the toll among first responders and is widely treated as a deliberate tactic.
The attack is among the most destructive on Kyiv’s cultural and civilian infrastructure in months, and lands as the war grinds on without a settlement.