Kyiv: Ukrainian officials reported Russian drone assaults resuming over the capital on Tuesday after a three-day ceasefire lapsed, alongside deadly strikes in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region that claimed one life, AFP reported.
Russia countered by announcing the downing of 27 Ukrainian drones after the truce expired.
The brief halt to the fighting, declared on Friday by US President Donald Trump just before Moscow’s World War II victory event, was pitched as potentially “the beginning of the end” for the conflict now in its fourth year.
However, accusations of civilian-targeted breaches flew between Kyiv and Moscow even as the pause held tenuously.
Air Raid Sirens Return to Kyiv
With the ceasefire’s end, Ukrainian authorities alerted residents to incoming drones over Kyiv.
“Enemy UAVs are currently over Kyiv. Please stay safe until the alert is cleared,” posted the capital’s military administration head, Tymur Tkachenko, on Telegram.
Kyiv’s regional military
administration issued urgent shelter orders as drones loomed overhead, marking the capital’s first confirmed air raid siren since last Friday—just before the fragile truce began—and cautioning that air defense systems were likely engaging threats across the area to counter the incursion.
In Dnipropetrovsk, Russian attacks killed a man and injured a woman near Synelnykove, besides three others across the region, according to military administrator Oleksandr Ganzha’s Telegram update.
Russia’s defense ministry stated that “air defence duty assets intercepted and destroyed 27 Ukrainian fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles” over Belgorod, Voronezh, and Rostov regions from midnight to 7:00 am Moscow time (2100 to 0400 GMT).
Frontline Fighting Persists
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared on Monday that combat raged on despite the truce, blaming Moscow’s reluctance to halt the war ignited by Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion.
“Today there was no silence at the front, there was fighting. We have recorded all of this,” Zelensky stated in his nightly address as the ceasefire wound down.
He added, “it was ‘clear that the war in Iran is now drawing the most attention from America’.”
Russia-Ukraine talks remain deadlocked, overshadowed by Iran tensions—though Trump’s initiative briefly fueled optimism for revived US-brokered efforts to end the invasion.