Ukraine war briefing: Russia launches attacks on Kharkiv and Kyiv as Zelenskyy asks for help | Ukraine

• A Russian attack on a post office in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, killed one person and injured nine others, including a baby.local authorities said. “One man, a postal worker, was killed,” the head of the Kharkiv regional administration, Oleg Synegubov, said on Telegram. The city of Kharkiv has been regularly attacked by Russian troops in recent months, but military analysts say the frequency has decreased since the US authorized the Ukrainians to use their weapons against certain Russian targets.

• In the Kyiv suburb of Obolon, the local military administration said that falling fragments from a Russian rocket had caused a fire and damaged balconies. on a 14-story apartment building. Emergency services said on the messaging app Telegram that five female residents were being treated for stress, and Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 10 residents had been evacuated. The head of the Kyiv region’s military administration said rocket fragments had also landed outside the capital, causing injuries and damage, but no details were given.

• Drone footage from the Ukrainian military appears to show corpses in a civilian area in the embattled city of Toretsk in eastern Ukraine.which has come under heavy Russian fire in recent days. The attacks in the war-torn Donetsk region have prompted Ukrainian emergency services to step up evacuation efforts. Local officials said powerful Russian glide bombs were also used in the city. Glide bombs are Soviet-era heavy bombs equipped with precision guidance systems and fired from aircraft flying beyond the range of air defenses.

• President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Telegram post that Russia had dropped more than 800 glide bombs on Ukrainian targets last week.. In his evening video address, he again appealed for better weapons systems. “The faster the world helps us deal with the Russian warplanes that are dropping these bombs, the faster we can attack Russian military infrastructure – and rightly so … and the closer we will be to peace,” he said.

• On Sunday, the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria elected Metropolitan Daniil – whom experts consider to be a pro-Russian personality of a church that is traditionally considered to be very close to Moscow – as its new head.Daniil supported the Kremlin in a long video message released in 2023. The Bulgarian Patriarch is elected for life unless he himself decides to resign.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report