Russia's strikes on Kyiv's suburbs kill 2, damage residential buildings

Russian strikes on the Ukrainian capital and its suburbs ignited fires and damaged residential buildings, killing at least two people and wounding several others, Kyiv’s mayor said Friday.

“Two dead in the capital. Five people were wounded. Three of them were treated on the spot by medics. Two were hospitalised,” Vitali Klitschko posted on Telegram.

Regional governor Mykola Kalashnyk urged people to stay in shelters until air raid sirens lifted.

Ukraine’s air force issued a countrywide alert late Thursday, warning “all of Ukraine is under a missile threat” and confirming Russian bombers were airborne.

In the western city of Lviv, the mayor said “critical infrastructure” was hit.

“All relevant services are working on the site, the fire is being extinguished,” Mayor Andriy Sadovy said.

The latest barrage comes after the US Embassy in Kyiv warned Thursday that a “potentially significant air attack” could occur at any time within the next several days.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had echoed the rare warning in his evening address.

Hours before the attack, Moscow had slammed a post-war plan for European peacekeepers to be deployed to Ukraine and branded Kyiv and its allies an “axis of war”.

European leaders and US envoys have been engaged in a flurry of diplomacy seeking to finalise a plan to end the almost four-year-long conflict.

In its latest iteration, the proposal’s post-war guarantees for Ukraine include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a European multinational force to be deployed once the fighting stops.

Zelensky said Thursday that an agreement was “essentially ready for finalisation at the highest level with the President of the United States” following talks between envoys in Paris this week.

Specific details, including about the size of the force and how it would engage, have not been made public.

Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Firstpost staff.