Russia Strikes Kyiv Again After Hitting the Academy of Sciences
Nine people were killed and more than eighty wounded across Ukraine on Monday, two of them at the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv, and Russia struck the capital again overnight. “We are not connected with the military,” said the academy’s president Anatoliy Zagorodny, standing outside the burning building. “This is an attack on science. It is terrorism.”
Six days of rolling strikes have moved steadily away from military targets and towards the things that make an economy function. A business centre in Dnipro was hit, killing three and wounding nineteen; one person died at a logistics office in Synelnykove; an attack on infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia wounded thirty-two; a medical facility and a pharmaceutical company were also struck. In Kyiv the mayor Vitalii Klitschko counted twenty-four injured, six of them taken to hospital. Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha framed it as a test of tolerance: “Russia is deliberately expanding the boundaries of what it believes the world will tolerate. Every attack left without a strong response only encourages the next one.” Meanwhile the three-way technical talks Washington proposed still have no date, with the United Arab Emirates floated as a venue. Watch whether one is fixed this week.