Ukraine attacked a town in Russia’s Kursk region Friday, killing six people, including a child, a senior local official said.
Ten others were hospitalized in the town of Rylsk after the attack with U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets, Kursk acting Governor Alexander Khinshtein said.
The attack, Ukrainian officials said, followed an earlier Russian missile attack on Kyiv.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said an early Friday morning Russian ballistic missile attack on the capital killed at least one person, wounded 13 and damaged six foreign embassies and a university in the city’s center.
On its Telegram social media account, Ukraine’s air force said it intercepted five Iskander short-range ballistic missiles fired at the city, but falling missile debris caused damage and sparked fires in three districts. City officials reported damage to multiple residential buildings, medical facilities and schools.
Air force officials urged citizens to immediately respond to reports of ballistic attack threats because they provide very little time to find shelter.
At a briefing in Kyiv on Friday, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Georgiy Tykhyi said the missile attack did significant damage to a building that houses the embassies of Albania, Argentina, the Palestinians, North Macedonia, Portugal and Montenegro. He shared pictures of the damage to the buildings. No injuries were reported in those attacks.
The Kyiv National Linguistics University said on its Instagram account that its building also had been hit, and it shared a picture of an area near an entrance where two large windows had been blown out.
Russia has said it launched the attack in retaliation for Kyiv’s firing U.S.-made weapons into Russia.
Russia’s attacks on Kyiv came one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s year-end press conference. Putin has been talking about negotiations to end the war “for quite some time, but the bombing has continued,” said Charles Kupchan, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
President-elect Donald Trump has talked about the possibility of talks with the Russian and Ukrainian presidents to end the war. He has said he could broker a deal to end the war in 24 hours.
Kupchan said Trump is “naive” to think he could get the two countries to come to an agreement so swiftly.
Trump “cannot afford a deal that effectively subjugates Ukraine and leaves it a ward of Russia,” Kupchan said. Ukraine must be defensible, he said, and “not left in a geopolitical limbo that invites Russia to simply pick up the war where it left off six months from now … or a year later.”
Meanwhile, Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister of justice, reported Friday that Russia had launched a cyberattack on state registers, resulting in a shutdown.
Stefanishyna made the initial report from her Facebook page, where she said it was clear the attack was orchestrated by Russia to “sow panic among citizens of Ukraine and abroad.”
She held a briefing later Friday in Kyiv along with Ukraine’s acting head of the Cybersecurity Department of the security service, Volodymyr Karastelov.
She told reporters that while it appeared no data were lost or stolen, the ministry suspended the activities of all state registers to avoid further deployment of threats. The affected registries include civil acts such as marriages, wills, births and car registrations, and Stefanishyna said they were working to restore them.
The Cybersecurity Department said its main line of investigation was that a hacker group affiliated with Russian military intelligence was behind the attack. Russia has yet to comment on the attack.
VOA’s Kim Lewis contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
