Russia has attacked a hospital in the centre of Kyiv, close to several western embassies, after Volodymyr Zelenskyy said speed restrictions on SpaceX’s Starshield system had made it harder for Ukraine to shoot down enemy drones.
Three people were injured when a drone smashed into the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics at 3am, hitting the second floor of the hospital and an adjoining 19th-century building.
Meanwhile, Russia claimed it had shot down nearly 1,200 Ukrainian drones overnight, one of the largest swarms sent by Kyiv. It reported that at least four people were killed in the southern region of Volgograd.
The blast in Kyiv blew out windows in nearby buildings including in the National Academy of Arts across the road. The six-storey hospital is located in the Shevchenkivskyi district, not far from the Danish and Romanian embassies, as well as cafes and a park popular with dog walkers.
Standing in the yard as smoke billowed from the burning building, and firefighters led dazed patients to safety, one witness, Oleksandr, said the attack had narrowly missed patients. “We were asleep when there was this massive boom. We all jumped out of bed straight away.
“There was glass all over the floor. People were running about … If it had hit a little further to the left it would have been much worse. We felt the shock wave.”
He added: “Targeting the wounded – that’s really low. Russia attacks everything. Where I live, high-rise blocks are being constantly hit by bombs. They don’t care where they drop them, or where they land.”
Russia has recently stepped up its strikes on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, hitting power plants, passenger trains and two bridges across the Dnipro river. Ukraine says the attacks are part of a campaign of terror, designed to make a weary population capitulate.
On Thursday, Zelenskyy said the Starshield system – operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and overseen by the Pentagon – was again experiencing significant disruptions, after an unexplained slowdown last month.
He said some Russian aerial sorties had got through because Ukrainian interceptor systems that rely on the US satellite service could not reach the necessary speed to knock out enemy drones. Starshield is the Ukrainian military’s version of Starlink.
The White House has yet to explain why the service has been throttled for a second time, but it comes after intense US-led shuttle diplomacy this week, with Donald Trump seemingly pressuring Zelenskyy to make territorial concessions to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s emissaries, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the real estate developer Steve Witkoff, met Putin in Moscow on Thursday. They then flew to Dublin to brief Zelenskyy on their talks, which came after trilateral negotiations on Tuesday and Wednesday in Abu Dhabi.
Kremlin negotiators insist that Ukraine hand over four Ukrainian provinces, including cities and villages Russian troops have been unable to conquer. They are also calling for a new “security architecture” in Europe – a demand in effect that Nato go back to its pre-1997 posture, before eastern European nations joined the alliance.
At the same time, Moscow does not want European states to be involved in US-brokered talks to end the war in Ukraine. On Thursday, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said Europe had to take part since “US support” for Kyiv had ended.
“Without Europeans, there is no support for Ukraine,” Macron said. “At the end of the day, we will be the ones to define and decide for our future security as Europeans.”
Meanwhile, Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure overnight caused power outages in 12 regions, said deputy energy minister Artem Nekrasov. The affected regions are 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.
In Kyiv, the orthopaedic hospital’s director, Roman Derkach, said medical services had been temporarily suspended as a cleanup operation got under way. Thirty patients were taken to safety.