A Russian guided aerial bomb struck an apartment building in Kharkiv early on Monday, injuring 22 people including children, according to Mayor Ihor Terekhov. The strike capped a weekend of intensifying Russian attacks across Ukraine that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has now publicly branded "terrorism" — and answered with a demand that new Western sanctions take effect as early as October.
The Kharkiv bomb hit a residential building in Ukraine's second-biggest city in the northeast, Terekhov said on Telegram. In Kyiv, meanwhile, a Russian drone struck a petrol station, the city authorities said on Telegram, without giving further details.
A guided bomb in Kharkiv, a drone over a Kyiv petrol station
Monday morning's Kharkiv strike is the latest in a wave that has hit cities across Ukraine around the clock. On Sunday, Russian strikes killed eight people across the country, according to Ukrainian authorities. Prosecutors said a drone attack hit a market in Sofiiska Borshchahivka on Kyiv's western outskirts, killing two people and injuring about ten. In Kyiv itself, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said nine people were injured, including a child.
The toll elsewhere was grim: three people died, including a 16-year-old girl, when Russian strikes hit a children's centre in the northern city of Sumy; three more were killed in night-time strikes on the southern Zaporizhzhia region; and a "massive strike" on the south of the Odesa region killed one person and damaged housing, a shop, a hotel, a medical building and a warehouse storing grain, regional head Oleg Kiper said.
Zelenskyy listed the civilian infrastructure damaged in the capital alone: two kindergartens, two schools, a residential building, an auto repair centre, warehouses and communications infrastructure — plus the residence of the Saudi Arabian ambassador. A sports school in the Dnipropetrovsk region and a regional children's home in the Sumy region were also hit, he said. These are Ukrainian officials' accounts; casualty figures from either side of this war cannot be independently verified.
'This is terrorism,' Zelensky says
In a statement on X, Zelenskyy accused Russia of deliberately terrorising Ukraine's civilian population — including, he said, setting a market outside Kyiv on fire and striking kindergartens, schools, homes and communications facilities.
"Anywhere in the world, this choice of targets would be called by one word – terrorism," he wrote. "Russia has no military objective whatsoever in doing this – it is purely an attempt to break people and inflict as much harm as possible on our society."
The president contrasted the strikes with Moscow's diplomatic signals. "If Russia were truly preparing for any real steps toward de-escalation – as it claims, particularly to American negotiators – this wave of … terror would not be happening," he said. His comments came as the UN General Assembly concluded in New York on Monday, after a weekend in which Russia's foreign minister dismissed Germany's calls to ease off what Berlin called a "dangerous path of escalation."
Zelenskyy said Russia had fired about 3,900 drones, aerial bombs and other missiles at Ukraine over the past week, and that 277 attack drones of different types were launched in a single day — 155 of them jet-powered. Those figures are Ukrainian claims and have not been independently verified, but they describe a tempo of bombardment that has made Kyiv and other cities' air defences the front line of the war this autumn.
Sanctions must take effect by October
Zelenskyy paired the "terrorism" accusation with a concrete demand: the United States should fully implement the Lindsey Graham Act, the sweeping sanctions legislation aimed at pressing Russia into ending the war. New sanctions packages targeting financial networks, supply chains and the companies and individuals helping produce Russian weapons "must take effect as early as October," he said, to provide "a stronger foundation for changing the situation and pushing Russia toward real diplomacy."
He said Ukraine was relying on "effective decisions" from its partners in the G7 and G20, "so that Russia sees that manipulating diplomatic signals will not allow it to keep winning more and more time for war and terror."
The message marks a shift in framing: after weeks of strikes on energy, logistics and now communications infrastructure — including Sunday's hit on the Kyivstar mobile provider's headquarters — Kyiv is no longer treating the bombardment as pressure on military supply lines alone, but as a systematic attempt to make civilian life unlivable ahead of winter. The answer it is asking for is not only air defence, but economic pain delivered on a deadline.
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