• Analysis
Kyiv hospital strike: Russian drone hits central Kyiv hospital as Starshield falters again
A Russian drone struck the Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics in central Kyiv at 3am, injuring three people, while President Zelenskyy said Thursday that SpaceX's Starshield system was again suffering significant disruptions.
Drone hits hospital near embassies
The Kyiv hospital strike came shortly before dawn, when a Russian drone slammed into the Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics, hitting the second floor and an adjoining 19th-century building. Three people were injured in the attack.
The six-storey hospital sits in the Shevchenkivskyi district, not far from the Danish and Romanian embassies, cafes and a park. The blast blew out windows across the road at the National Academy of Arts.
'Russia attacks everything'
A witness named Oleksandr said the drone narrowly missed patients and left glass strewn across the floor.
If it had hit a little further to the left it would have been much worse. We felt the shock wave.
He said Russia attacks everything, pointing to the constant bombings of the high-rise blocks where he lives. Hospital director Ronan Derkach said medical services were temporarily suspended during the clean-up, and thirty patients were taken to safety.
Starshield disruption hits interceptors
On Thursday, Zelenskyy said SpaceX's 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 relying on the US satellite service could not reach the necessary speed to knock out 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, amid US-led shuttle diplomacy with Trump pressuring Zelenskyy toward territorial concessions to Putin.
Talks stall and outages spread
Diplomacy continued this week on several fronts:
- •Trump's emissaries Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met Putin in Moscow on Thursday, then flew to Dublin to brief Zelenskyy.
- •The meetings followed trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Kremlin negotiators demand Ukraine hand over four provinces, including cities Russia has not conquered, and want a new European security architecture that would in effect return Nato to its pre-1997 posture. Russia does not want European states involved in the US-brokered talks; French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that Europe had to take part since US support for Kyiv had ended.
At the end of the day, we will be the ones to define and decide for our future security as Europeans.
Russia claimed it shot down nearly 1,200 Ukrainian drones overnight - one of the largest swarms sent by Kyiv - and reported at least four people killed in the Volgograd region. Overnight strikes on energy infrastructure caused power outages in 12 regions, according to deputy energy minister Artem Nekrasov, who listed Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Rivne, Sumy, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Chernihiv. He said energy workers are working at an intensified pace, but new attacks and constant air raid alerts are complicating and delaying repairs.
Russia has stepped up strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, hitting power plants, passenger trains and two bridges across the Dnipro river; Ukraine calls the attacks a campaign of terror to force a weary population to capitulate.
