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Here’s where things stand on Thursday 19 June 2025:
Fighting
- The death toll from a large-scale Russian attack on Kyiv earlier this week has risen to 28, with 130 injured, although rescue work is still under way.
- The attack was carried out by 440 drones and 32 missiles, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
- Moscow characterised the attack as precision strikes on “military-industrial facilities in the Kyiv region”, although video footage showed the attack levelling parts of an apartment block in the Ukrainian capital.
- Russia said it captured the village of Novomykolaivka in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region, where Russian forces have renewed their offensive. The region has been at the centre of fighting since the Russian invasion in 2022.
Diplomacy
- Speaking to foreign media at a late-night news conference, Russian leader Vladimir Putin dismissed fears that he was planning to attack the NATO military alliance. He said the military bloc and its rearmament did not threaten Russia.
- Putin said he would consider Germany to be a direct actor in the Ukraine war should it supply Kyiv with Taurus cruise missiles. Earlier this month, Germany’s Ministry of Defence said it did not have plans to do so, despite repeated requests from Ukraine.
- Putin further said he does not consider Germany to be a “neutral state”, but a “party supporting Ukraine, and in some cases … as accomplices in these hostilities”.
- Despite his remarks, Putin said he was prepared to meet with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, although he also expressed doubts about Germany’s role as a mediator in the Russia-Ukraine war.
- Putin has offered to meet with Zelenskyy but only during the “final phase” of talks to end the conflict. Last month, Putin declined to attend a face-to-face summit in Istanbul with the Ukrainian president.
- Zelenskyy is reportedly planning to attend a NATO meeting in The Hague next week, where members will discuss raising defence spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
Sanctions
- Canada announced new sanctions targeting 77 individuals, 39 entities and 200 vessels in Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers. In addition to the sanctions, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged a further $1.47bn in military support for Ukraine.
In its war on Ukraine, is Russia’s vast size becoming a liability?
Ukraine’s retaliatory attacks are more daring than ever, striking deeper into the world’s largest country.
A flight from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok takes almost nine hours – a domestic flight that covers two-thirds of Russia’s span between the Baltic and the Pacific.
There are about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) from east to west in Russia, which is 17 million square kilometres (6.6 million square miles), comprising 11 percent of the Earth’s landmass – a bit more than the areas of China, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia put together.
Even though two-thirds of it is permafrost, the sheer vastness used to save Russia from invasions, be it Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1812 or the 3.8 million soldiers of Nazi Germany and its allies in 1941.
However, as the war with Ukraine, a former province whose Cossack armies once spearheaded czarist conquests, grinds into its fourth year, Russia’s size has become a liability.
“Russia’s territory offers maximal capabilities for strikes,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera sarcastically.
Ukrainians – from top brass to civilian volunteers assembling drones in their garages – rewrite the rules of warfare and write off Russia’s obsolete stratagems.
These days, Kyiv proves daily that the border between Russia and Ukraine that stretches almost 2,000 kilometres (1,230 miles) is penetrable in both directions.
It carved out toeholds in two western Russian regions – Kursk and Bryansk – that distract tens of thousands of servicemen.
Meanwhile, Moscow’s Soviet-era air defence systems, designed to intercept NATO missiles, are spread too thin across western Russia and often prove helpless against increasingly sophisticated Ukrainian drone attacks.
If a group of people is professional and motivated enough, it’ll always find a way to achieve a goal, and that’s something the SBU proved,” Romanenko said, referring to the Ukrainian Security Service, the main intelligence agency that has conducted dozens of stings in Russia.
After a night of terror in Kyiv, the search for dead goes on
Evhen Povarenkov was standing at a line of police tape that separated the public from the intensive search and rescue operation around his building.
He stared up at what was left of his apartment, in a suburb of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. His windows had disappeared, his balcony was on the verge of collapse.
Below, personal belongings were strewn across the pathways. Bedsheets and towels hung from the branches of trees.
A cruise missile slammed into this ordinary residential block in the Solomianskyi neighbourhood in the early hours of Tuesday morning, likely travelling at about 500mph. The blast destroyed 35 apartments and hollowed out an entire section of the building.
By Wednesday afternoon, 23 people had been found dead in the rubble. Across Ukraine, at least 30 were known to have been killed in the attacks, all but two of them in Kyiv.
The air strike on Povarenkov’s building was just one of a huge wave sent by Russia – a total of more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Ukraine’s air force said.
The barrage smashed the capital for nine hours, from midnight until well past dawn. It was among the worst attacks on Kyiv since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
Povarenkov, a 43-year-old warehouse worker, looked down from his wrecked apartment. His face was cut and grazed all over and one of his eyes was severely bloodshot. He could not see out of it.
He was in bed when the missile hit, he said. His elderly mother was asleep in the next room.
“There was heat, fire, and smoke,” he said, recalling the huge impact just metres from his wall. “I lost consciousness. When I came to, I heard my mother screaming.”
Neighbours helped Povarenkov knock out his warped door and get his mother out of the apartment. Other survivors were emerging into the remains of the shattered building.
“People were screaming, children were crying,” said pensioner Arcadiy Volenchuk, 60. “It was total chaos.”
Outside, the residents tried to find a safe route through burning cars and falling debris.
“Everything was on fire,” said Alla, 69, a teacher. “The fuel tanks in the cars were exploding. Broken glass was pouring from above, along with pieces of concrete and tiles.”
Povarenkov’s mother was rushed to intensive care, he said, with two broken collarbones, cuts to both her eyes and severe damage to her internal organs that required surgery.
She was one of more than 100 wounded in the city. At around midnight, Serhii Dubrov, anesthesiologist and director of the 12th Kyiv City Clinical Hospital, felt the strikes begin.
Within hours, his hospital alone would receive 27 patients, he said.
“They had soft tissue injuries, lacerations from broken glass, damage to blood vessels. There were traumatic brain injuries and internal chest injuries. One had a severed femoral artery – we were able to repair it. The worst was a woman with open head injury.
“These are the kinds of injuries we see from these kinds of attacks.”
The patients at Dr Dubrov’s hospital ranged from 18 to 95, he said. Three were in their 90s. Strikes like these, on residential buildings, can be particularly dangerous for the elderly and infirm, who cannot easily dash to an underground shelter.
Oleksandr Bondarchuk, a 64-year-old disabled man whose apartment was also close to the impact point, could not make it to the shelter. He lay in bed terrified throughout, he said.
An hour after the attack, Bondarchuk was able to slowly make his way downstairs. “It was terrible,” he said. “Everything was destroyed.”
Some of those whose apartments were severely damaged were able to find shelter with friends or relatives. Others were not so fortunate. “This is all I have,” Bondarchuk said.
The strikes hit Ukraine as the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was travelling to the G7 conference in Canada to meet world leaders. Some in Ukraine suspect that the timing was intentional – a brutal message from Russia.
The scale of the attack underscored Ukraine’s desperate need for international support, including increased air defences. But in the end, it would prove to be an unsuccessful day for Zelensky.
His much anticipated bilateral meeting with US President Donald Trump evaporated as the strikes were happening, when Trump announced he would leave the conference early amid the crisis in the Middle East.
With Trump not present, a meeting of European leaders on Ukraine failed to produce a joint statement of support for the country – a statement that was much-hoped for on the Ukrainian side.
As Zelensky travelled home from Canada on Wednesday, people from around the Solomianskyi neighbourhood in south-west Kyiv gathered to lay flowers at the site of the cruise missile attack.
Police wouldn’t let Evhen Povarenkov pass the line of tape to retrieve his and his mother’s possessions from their shattered apartment, so he just stood and stared. A hundred feet away, emergency workers had just found two more bodies in the rubble.
They did not know how many more they would find, they said.
Death toll rises after Russia’s deadliest attack on Kyiv for months
Ukrainian emergency services have continued to recover bodies from under rubble in Kyiv after Russia hit the city with a huge missile and drone attack overnight into Tuesday.
At least 28 people have been killed and more than 100 injured, officials said, as the death toll increased on Wednesday after having been revised several times, both upwards and downwards. There were also two fatalities in Odesa.
As part of the strikes, a drone smashed into an apartment block destroying dozens of flats.
The attack was among the biggest on the capital since the start of Russia’s full-scale war, with Ukraine’s interior minister saying the country had been hit by 440 drones and 32 missiles.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had targeted Ukraine’s military-industrial complexes and that all its targets had been hit.
The strikes on Kyiv lasted more than nine hours – sending residents fleeing to underground shelters from before midnight until after sunrise.
Officials said a ballistic missile hit a nine-storey apartment building in the southwestern Solomyanskyi district – bodies continued to be recovered from the site on Wednesday.
A total of 27 locations in the city came under fire, according to authorities.
A 62-year-old US citizen was among those killed in Solomyanskyi, Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said early on Tuesday.
US State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce later confirmed the “tragic death” of an American citizen.
Standing in front of the remains of the building, Klitschko said more than 40 apartments had been destroyed and more people might be trapped under the rubble.
He accused Russia of firing cluster bomblets filled with ball bearings to kill as many people as possible.
“Waking up in utter nightmare: people trapped under rubble and full buildings collapsed,” Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko wrote on X on Tuesday.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said that a variety of buildings had come under Russian attack, including residential, critical infrastructure and educational facilities.
People were still under the rubble by late afternoon on Tuesday and rescue work was going on at two sites, he said. Klymenko explained that initial mistakes made in counting the dead often happened because body parts were wrongly identified.
Loud explosions rocked the city in the early hours of Tuesday, along with the rattle of the machine guns used by mobile Ukrainian air defence units to shoot down drones.
More sirens later in the morning disrupted rescue operations in the city, hampering emergency workers searching the rubble for survivors.
Russia has intensified its air attacks against Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, with a tactic of sending large waves of drones and decoys designed to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences.
Kyiv has launched attacks of its own, as direct talks between the warring sides failed to secure a ceasefire or significant breakthrough.
Russia accused Ukrainian forces of launching a missile strike on a district in occupied Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, and Russia-appointed officials said at least 10 people had been hurt.
A reported 147 Ukrainian drones were shot down over nine Russian regions overnight, Russian news agencies said.
President Zelensky called Russia’s most recent wave of strikes “pure terrorism”.
He accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of carrying out the large-scale strikes “solely because he can afford to continue this war”.
“It is bad when the powerful of this world turn a blind eye to this,” he said, adding: “It is the terrorists who should feel the pain, not normal, peaceful people.”
Drone strikes also hit the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa, killing two people and wounding 10 others, officials said.
Zelensky had been hoping to speak with US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit on Tuesday, but Trump cut short his stay amid the escalating crisis in the Middle East.
The news would have come as a blow to Zelensky and his administration, which had been hoping to secure US support at the conference for Ukraine’s strategic and military goals.