U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk will arrive in Kyiv early on May 10.
The United States embassy in Kyiv on May 9 issued a warning that Russia could launch "a potentially significant" attack in the coming days, despite Putin's self-declared Victory Day "truce."
The sanctioned oil tankers have transported over $24 billion in cargo since 2024, according to Downing Street. The U.K. has now sanctioned more shadow fleet vessels than any other country.
Washington and its partners are considering additional sanctions if the parties do not observe a ceasefire, with political and technical negotiations between Europe and the U.S. intensifying since last week, Reuters' source said.
The Kyiv Independent’s contributor Ignatius Ivlev-Yorke spent a day with a mobile team from the State Emergency Service in Nikopol in the south of Ukraine as they responded to relentless drone, artillery, and mortar strikes from Russian forces just across the Dnipro River. Nikopol is located across from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Enerhodar.
Peter Szijjarto's announcement came after Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) allegedly dismantled a Hungarian military intelligence network operating in Zakarpattia Oblast.
Damaged cars near a city's infrastructure facility building damaged by a Russian guided aerial bomb strike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Jan. 8, 2025. (Elena Tita/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
Ukrainian forces shot down a Russian guided aerial bomb near the front-line southern city of Zaporizhzhia on Feb. 7, Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat told Interfax-Ukraine.
Guided aerial bombs (KABs), while having a shorter range than missiles, are cheaper to produce and are launched from aircraft within Russian territory or Russian-occupied territories, beyond the reach of Ukrainian air defense.
They are nearly impossible to shoot down because they have heavy iron structures, and come in extremely fast from high altitudes, unlike cruise missiles or drones, according to experts.
According to Ihnat, it was not the first time Ukraine downed a guided bomb.
"To counter this threat, we need a comprehensive approach — both the use of ground-based air defense and aviation components to drive the carriers of these KABs as far as possible," the spokesperson said, without specifying how the target was shot down.
His remarks came after Telegram channels reported that Ukrainian soldiers had down the guided aerial bomb on the morning of Feb. 7, allegedly using experimental weaponry.
Russia regularly attacks Ukrainian front-line settlements with guided bombs. Over the past week, a total of 760 such bombs were launched at Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
According to the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Russian glide bombs killed 360 Ukrainian civilians in 2024, and injured 1,861, a threefold increase in fatalities, and a sixfold increase in injuries compared to 2023.
Kateryna Denisova works as a News Editor at the Kyiv Independent. She previously worked as a news editor at the NV media outlet for four years, covering mainly Ukrainian and international politics. Kateryna holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv. She also was a fellow at journalism schools in the Czech Republic and Germany.
Kateryna Hodunova
