Russia just bombed Kyiv hours after Putin called talks the closest yet
1 hour ago · 22 October 2026Share
Cars under a residential building in Kyiv caught fire due to falling fragments of a downed drone during a Russian attack with kamikaze drones on May 30, 2023. File photo. National Police of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0
Russia just bombed Kyiv with drones and missiles overnight.
And it happened a few hours after Donald Trump's envoy sat down with Vladimir Putin and called the talks the closest the two sides have ever been to ending the war.
So what actually landed on Kyiv? One person is dead. 22 people are wounded. The strikes hit four districts of the city.
In the Dniprovskyi district, homes and vehicles were damaged, buildings caught fire, and one person was killed. Five others were hurt there, including a child. Eight people were injured in the Pecherskyi district, three of them children. Six more were hurt in the Holosiivskyi district. Two were hurt in the Darnytskyi district.
Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv's mayor, says the strikes also hit part of the city's metro system near the South Bridge. Train traffic is still restricted.
Ukraine's air force says it shot down 181 Russian drones overnight. And strike drones were still in the air as this morning began.
Ukraine fired back too. Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, says around 630 Ukrainian drones were sent toward the Moscow region overnight. Most were intercepted. Two people were wounded.
Euronews, citing AFP, reports seven people killed nationwide across Ukraine — in Sumy, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk. The Ukrainian outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe separately reports one person killed and 13 injured in the Kharkiv region alone. Those two counts have not been fully reconciled yet.
Now here's the timing that matters.
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Aerial view of Berezniaky district in Kyiv, Ukraine. Maksym Kozlenko · CC BY-SA 4.0
The strikes landed a few hours after Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump's special envoy, met Vladimir Putin for about three hours at the Constantine Palace in St Petersburg. This was the ninth time Witkoff has met Putin face to face since the war began. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, joined the meeting remotely by video.
As the talks began, Russia released Stephen Hubbard. He's a 74-year-old retired American teacher who had been held for more than four years after Russian forces seized him in 2022.
After the meeting, Donald Trump told reporters the US and Russia says quote "maybe now the closest we've been" to ending the conflict. No breakthrough was announced. Witkoff was more careful. He called the talks constructive, and said important work remained.
Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin foreign affairs adviser, says Putin is in principle ready to resume three-way talks involving Russia, Ukraine and the US. Possibly around 10 November. Possibly in Abu Dhabi.
Ushakov says Witkoff briefed Putin on new aspects in the approaches of the Europeans and Kyiv, from a meeting Witkoff held with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders in Oslo the day before. But he says there wasn't really much substance in them.
Zelenskyy says Ukraine wants the three-way meeting to happen no later than early November. He said it shortly before missile alerts sounded over Kyiv.
So what does Russia say it was bombing? Russia's Defence Ministry says the Kyiv strikes hit Ukrainian military-industrial facilities that produce and store long- and medium-range cruise missiles and drones, plus transport infrastructure. Ukraine hasn't directly answered that claim. Its officials have instead listed the homes damaged and the people hurt in four districts.
Here's what we don't know. Whether the Kyiv strikes were planned before Witkoff sat with Putin, or came as a response to it. Whether Russia sees continued strikes as compatible with the negotiating position it gave Witkoff. And whether the mid-November trilateral talks actually happen at all. The last US-mediated Russia-Ukraine peace talks were in February, before the US and Israel went to war with Iran.
For now, the two sides are doing both things at once. A Kremlin aide talking about November talks in Abu Dhabi. And Russian missiles landing in Kyiv the same night.
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