Four people were killed while the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, a symbol of Ukrainian spiritual and cultural history, caught fire, in the heaviest Russian air attack on the Ukrainian capital in two weeks, authorities said on Monday (Jun 15), urging residents to take shelter.
The fresh strikes came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday he had spoken to US President Donald Trump and discussed efforts to achieve an end to the more than four-year conflict, ahead of a G7 meeting in France this week.
The central Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site founded in 1051, was seriously damaged in a direct attack, Tymur Tkachenko, the head of the capital’s military administration, said in a Telegram post.
“A brutal assault on our people and our heritage. This is the true face of Russia’s Orthodox values,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said on X. As towering flames rose over the monastery, residents took shelter underground in the worst Russian attack on Ukraine since early June when drones and missiles killed more than 20 people and left more than 100 wounded.
Drones and missiles struck several high-rise apartment buildings and damaged electricity lines, leaving some 140,000 residents without power, according to Kyiv authorities.
Four people were killed and 23 injured, Tkachenko said.
“What more must the Kremlin Antichrist do for the world to realise that decisive action must be taken so that the Russian terror against Ukraine and the very principles of peace come to an end?” Metropolitan Epifaniy, head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, said on X.
Neighbouring Poland, an EU and NATO member, scrambled fighter jets on Monday against a possible airspace incursion, before recalling the alert and saying no sky violation had been recorded, its Armed Forces said in a post on X.
Ukraine would be “urgently initiating” procedures within UNESCO and other international mechanisms to ensure “immediate and adequate responses to this state barbarism,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X in reference to the monastery attack, with Estonian foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, also condemning the Russian strikes.