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Here’s where things stand on Monday 23 June 2025:

Fighting

• Russian drone and missile attacks in and around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, overnight have killed at least five people and wounded dozens, according to Ukrainian officials.
• The attacks also sparked fires in residential areas and damaged an entrance to a metro station that serves as a bomb shelter, the officials said.
• Russia launched 352 drones and 16 missiles targeting Ukrainian territory overnight on Monday, according to Ukraine’s Air Force.
• Russia’s air defence units destroyed 16 Ukrainian drones between 10pm local time on Sunday (19:00 GMT) and 6am on Monday (03:00 GMT), the Russian Ministry of Defence said.
• In his nightly address on Sunday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Norway would invest $400m in his country’s defence sector.

Diplomacy

• Zelenskyy says he plans to visit the UK on Monday to discuss Ukraine’s defence and additional pressure on Russia. “We will also be negotiating new and powerful steps to increase pressure on Russia for this war and to put an end to the strikes,” he wrote on social media.
• Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Sunday said that Spain has not committed to increasing annual defence-related spending to at least 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
• It came after news emerged that NATO allies, who are meeting this week in the Netherlands, had agreed to a big increase in their defence spending target to counter what they describe as a growing threat from Russia and allow Europe to take more responsibility for its own security.
• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has urged the European Union to take a proposed ban on Russian energy off the agenda due to an expected rise in energy prices following the US’s bombing of Iran on Sunday.

Missile and drone strikes target residential areas in numerous districts across Kyiv.

A “massive” Russian drone and missile attack has killed at least 10 people in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the surrounding region, according to officials.

Officials said the strikes on Monday morning targeted residential areas in numerous districts across the city. The assault, the second huge overnight blitz in a week, suggests Russia is eager to raise the pressure as global attention is dominated by the decision of the United States to join Israel’s escalating air campaign against Iran.

Russia fired 352 drones and decoys, 11 ballistic missiles and five cruise missiles overnight, according to Ukraine’s air force. Air defences intercepted or jammed the majority of the projectiles before they could reach their targets, it said in a statement.

“Another massive attack on the capital. Possibly, several waves of enemy drones,” Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said in a statement.

“The Russians’ style is unchanged – to hit where there may be people,” Tkachenko said on Telegram. “Residential buildings, exits from shelters – this is the Russian style.”

As well as residential buildings, hospitals, sports infrastructure, and the entrance of a metro station being used as a bomb shelter were hit during the large-scale attack, emergency services said.

The attack caused damage in six of Kyiv’s 10 districts and wounded at least 10 people, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram.

Several  people “were killed in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district, where the entire entrance of a residential high-rise building was destroyed,” Klymenko said. “There are still people under the rubble.”

A short-range drone attack in the Chernihiv region late on Sunday killed two people and wounded 10 others, including three children, according to authorities.

Another person was killed and eight were wounded overnight in the city of Bila Tserkva, some 85km (53 miles) southwest of Kyiv.

Sabotage

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said preliminary data indicated that Russian forces had used North Korean missiles in the strikes on Kyiv.

He called Russia, North Korea and Iran, which has provided drones to Moscow, a “coalition of murderers” and warned of a potential spread of the “terror” if their alliance continues.

Moscow’s military said on Monday afternoon that its overnight strikes had targeted “military-industrial complex enterprises in the Kyiv region”.

Both Russia and Ukraine deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched in February 2022, but thousands of civilians have been killed in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.

Russia’s deadliest attack on Kyiv came last week as it unleashed hundreds of drones, killing 28 people and injuring more than 150, with Ukrainian officials saying nearly 30 sites were hit in waves of attacks.

Ukraine’s  commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, amid the rise in attacks on the capital, has pledged to intensify strikes on Russia.

“We will not just sit in defence. Because this brings nothing and eventually leads to the fact that we still retreat, lose people and territories,” he said, according to the AFP news agency.

To that end, Ukraine “will increase the scale and depth” of its attacks on Russian military targets, he added.

Russian forces launched at least 47 drones against Ukraine and fired three missiles overnight on Sunday, the Ukrainian air force said.

Kyiv has accused Moscow of deliberately sabotaging efforts towards agreeing a peace deal, which has been pushed by US President Donald Trump, to prolong its full-scale offensive on the country and to seize more territory.

As Israel-Iran war escalates, Ukraine fears ‘more losses’ to Russia

Washington’s support for Kyiv, already in doubt under President Trump, is set to decline further, analysts say.

There is a Persian word millions of Ukrainians fear.

Shahed – also spelled as Shaheed or Shahid, originally a Quranic term for “martyr” or “witness” – is the name given to the triangular, explosives-laden, Iranian-designed drones that became a harrowing part of daily life and death in wartime Ukraine.

These  days, they are assembled in the Volga-region Russian city of Yelabuga and undergo constant modifications to make them faster, smarter and deadlier during each air raid that involves hundreds of drones.

Their latest Russian versions shot down in Ukraine earlier this month have artificial intelligence modules to better recognise targets, video cameras and two-way radio communication with human operators.

“The word ‘Shahed’ will forever be cursed in Ukrainian next to ‘Moscow’ and ‘Putin’,” said Denys Kovalenko, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kovalenko’s face and arms were cut by glass shards after a Shahed exploded above his northern Kyiv neighbourhood in 2023.

Shaheds are the most visible and audible part of the military alliance between Moscow and Tehran that is being tested this month amid attacks by Israel and the United States on Iran.

Other aspects of the alliance that affect the Russia-Ukraine war include Iranian-made ammunition, helmets, and flak jackets, according to Nikita Smagin, an author and expert on Russia-Iran relations.

However, the year 2022, when Putin started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was the “peak of Iran’s significance for Russia as a military partner”, Smagin told Al Jazeera.

The Kremlin has invested tens of billions of dollars into its military-industrial complex and shadow systems to supply chips, machine tools and dual-purpose goods for its weapons that bypass Western sanctions.

The flow of military technologies usually went the other way as Moscow supplied advanced air defence systems, missiles and warplanes to Tehran, keeping Israel worried.

In 2009, then-Israeli President Shimon Peres told this reporter in Moscow that his visit was aimed at convincing the Kremlin to “reconsider” the sale of S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Tehran.

Russia’s advanced Su-35 jets were supposed to be delivered to Tehran earlier this year, but were not seen in the Iranian sky.

Washington’s arms supplies to Israel have already affected Kyiv’s ability to withstand Russia’s air raids and slow advance on the ground.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on June 9 that the White House decided to divert 20,000 anti-drone missiles earmarked for Kyiv.

“Without the help of the United States, we’ll have more losses,” Zelenskyy said in televised remarks.

More Ukraine-bound military aid may now be diverted to Israel, and the Kremlin “counts on this scenario”, analyst Smagin said.

This possible diversion already alarms Ukraine’s top brass.

Arms that were “made for Ukraine will go to the Middle East, so there are no illusions about it”, Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera.

There should also be no illusions about Russia’s ability to protect Iran, he said.

Even though Moscow and Tehran hail their strategic partnership, it does not envisage a mutual defence clause.

Therefore, the Kremlin will hardly be able to commit to military action similar to the Russian air raids against Syria’s then-opposition to support then-President Bashar al-Assad’s faltering regime, he said.

“They won’t change anything significantly,” Romanenko said. “But they will have enough for arms supplies.”

Any arms supplies may, however, enrage US President Donald Trump, who has so far showed unusual leniency towards Moscow’s actions in Ukraine as his administration botched peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv.

Moscow’s condemnation of Israeli and US strikes on Iran evoked a sense of hypocrisy, some observers said, as Russia’s description of the attacks sounded familiar.

“No matter what arguments are used to justify an irresponsible decision to subject a sovereign state’s territory to missile and bomb strikes, [the decision] rudely violates international law, the United Nations charter and the resolutions of the UN Security Council,” Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Sunday.

‘Moscow and Iran compete for China’s market’

There is an area where Russia and Iran compete for multibillion-dollar oil trade profits that keep their sanctions-hobbled economies afloat.

“Moscow and Iran compete for China’s market, and China will respectively have to buy more Russian oil at a higher price,” Smagin said.

A fifth of global oil exports go through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow channel between Iran and Oman that is fully controlled by Tehran’s “mosquito fleet” of tiny warships.

Crude prices will skyrocket worldwide if Tehran opts to close the strait to tankers. It would also strike a financial bonanza for Russia that could further finance the war in Ukraine.

And as Moscow’s war in Ukraine consumes most of Russia’s resources, its reputation in the Middle East will suffer.

“Reputation-wise, Russia suffers huge losses as it risks not to be seen as a great power in the Middle East,” Smagin said.

If Tehran rejects Trump’s “ultimate ultimatum” to work out a peace deal, Washington’s attention to Iran and Israel may spell disaster for Kyiv.

“Undoubtedly, the US’s refocusing on the Middle East and Iran is a geopolitical catastrophe for us; there’s nothing to argue about,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kuschch told Al Jazeera.

Search for survivors after Russian drone and missile barrage hits Kyiv

Attack on Kyiv kills five and wounds others as rescue efforts continue.

A Russian air attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, killed at least five people and wounded others, according to Ukraine’s emergency services.

Drones and missiles hit residential areas, hospitals and sport infrastructure in numerous districts across Kyiv in the early hours of Monday, officials said.

The most severe damage took place in the Shevchenkivskyi district, where one section of a five-storey block of flats collapsed.

Five people were confirmed killed in the attack on the building, while 10 others, including a pregnant woman, have been rescued from a nearby tower block that also sustained heavy damage.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, another person was killed and eight injured in the city of Bila Tserkva, some 85km (53 miles) southwest of the capital.

There was no immediate comment from Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in February 2022. It has denied deliberately targeting civilians, but thousands have been killed and wounded since the war began.

Diplomatic efforts to end the three-year war have stalled, with the last direct meeting between the two sides almost three weeks ago and no follow-up talks scheduled. [Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo]

What happened on Sunday 22 June 2025?

Here is how things stand on Sunday, June 22:

Fighting

• Russia has struck several locations, including Chernihiv, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, killing at least seven people and injuring more than 20 over the past day, the Kyiv Independent has reported.
• Ukraine has said it has evidence that Russia is preparing new military operations on European territory, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said on X.
• Emergency workers have found three bodies under the rubble of a four-storey residential building in Kramatorsk hit by a Russian missile.
• Ukrainian Army Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskii has said that Ukraine will continue, and increase, its strikes against military targets deep inside Russia three weeks after a brazen attack on remote Russian airbases.

Politics and diplomacy

• Zelenskyy’s office has said Kyiv imposed new sanctions on individuals and legal entities doing business in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, including Crimea.
• Russia has sent Ukraine at least 20 of its own dead soldiers in recent exchanges with Kyiv due to Moscow’s disorganisation, the Ukrainian president said.
• Russia has rejected the claims, saying that reports over body substitutions are propaganda, according to Russia’s TASS news agency.
• “Ukraine has received 6,060 bodies of its servicemen. In return, we have received the remains of 78 Russian soldiers,” the report said.