Russian drone smashes Kyiv hospital as Starshield slowdowns return

The drone hit the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics in Kyiv's Shevchenkivskyi district at 3am, striking the second floor of the six-storey building and an adjoining 19th-century structure. Three people were injured. The blast blew out windows across the road at the National Academy of Arts and in nearby buildings, a short walk from the Danish and Romanian embassies.

Witness Oleksandr, standing in the yard as smoke poured from the burning building and firefighters led dazed patients out, said the strike narrowly missed patients. “We were asleep when there was this massive boom. We all jumped out of bed straight away,” he said. “If it had hit a little further to the left it would have been much worse. We felt the shock wave.” Hospital director Ronan Derkach said medical services were suspended for a cleanup operation, and 30 patients were taken to safety.

Zelenskyy said the Starshield satellite system — run by Elon Musk's SpaceX and overseen by the Pentagon — was suffering significant disruptions again, after an unexplained slowdown last month. He said some Russian aerial sorties got through because Ukrainian interceptors that rely on the US service could not reach the speed needed to knock out enemy drones. The White House has not explained why the service was throttled a second time.

The outage lands in the middle of intense US-led shuttle diplomacy. Donald Trump's emissaries, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and developer Steve Witkoff, met Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday, then flew to Dublin to brief Zelenskyy, following trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday. Kremlin negotiators are demanding Ukraine hand over four provinces, including cities and villages Russian troops never captured, plus a new European “security architecture” that would push Nato back to its pre-1997 posture. Moscow also wants European states kept out of the talks; France's Emmanuel Macron said Europe must be at the table since “US support” for Kyiv had ended.

Russia claimed it shot down nearly 1,200 Ukrainian drones overnight, one of the largest swarms Kyiv has sent, and reported at least four people killed in the southern Volgograd region. Strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure caused power outages in 12 regions, deputy energy minister Artem Nekrasov said, naming Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Rivne, Sumy, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Chernihiv. “Energy workers are working at an intensified pace, but new attacks and constant air raid alerts are complicating and delaying repairs,” Nekrasov said.

Moscow has stepped up strikes on civilian infrastructure in recent weeks, hitting power plants, passenger trains and two bridges across the Dnipro river. Ukraine calls the campaign an attempt at terror aimed at forcing a weary population to capitulate.