The most-read piece on РИА Новости when we collected was an account of remarks by Glenn Diesen, a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway, made on a YouTube channel. РИА reported him as saying that Ukraine is being defeated across the whole front and that the West is not in a position to help it.
The conflict was entering a new stage, he said, and NATO's weapons stocks were finished. It was not that Trump did not want to send Ukraine Patriot interceptor missiles, he said — he did not have them; and the same went for the Europeans, who were running out of money and weapons, as the Ukrainians were running out of soldiers. The Russians could see what was happening, he said, and a crack was running along the whole front, leaving Ukraine in a weak position from which Russia could land a knockout blow. He also said Ukrainian forces could not counter Russian air attacks, and listed the targets: factories, assembly shops, distribution centres, warehouses and other logistics sites, bridges, railways, filling stations and refineries.
The same piece carried claims from the Russian defence ministry. It said its forces had taken the settlements of Matyashevo and Nikolaypolye in the Donetsk region over the previous day, that overnight they had struck military-industry plants, a transport and logistics centre and warehouses in Kyiv and the surrounding region, and that the opposing side had lost 1,390 servicemen.
Reporting from outside Russia describes what that night looked like on the ground. NBC News reports that the strikes hit twelve locations across Kyiv's Darnytskyi, Sviatoshynskyi and Solomianskyi districts, damaging residential buildings, a medical facility and an educational institution, and that Volodymyr Zelensky put the wounded at about forty. In Solomianskyi district the top two floors of a nine-storey residential block were destroyed and fires broke out on other floors; seven people were killed there, and the mayor, Vitali Klitschko, declared a day of mourning. ABC News reports power supply cut to 50,000 homes.
The totals do not agree. NBC's headline figure is at least twelve killed and 33 wounded; ABC reports at least thirteen killed and more than thirty injured; UN News reports seventeen killed and more than forty injured. What all three carry alike is the seven in the Solomianskyi block.
All three also describe the same shortage. Russia has stepped up ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv in recent months, and Ukraine is short of the American Patriot interceptors that are the only weapon in its arsenal able to bring ballistic missiles down. NBC reports that international stockpiles are low, and that the overnight barrage also included cruise missiles and jet-powered drones that put further strain on air defences. UN News reports that Zelensky said his allies' failure to replenish air-defence missiles was costing civilian lives, and that in the first six months of 2026 UN monitors confirmed 1,396 Ukrainian civilians killed and 7,978 injured.
Why it is on the board
Top of РИА Новости's most-read list when we collected. Two Russian reading lists returned to us in that collection, РИА and Коммерсантъ, and this item came from one of them alone rather than from both.
확인: РИА Новости · NBC News · ABC News (Australia) · UN News