Kyiv under massive drone, missile attack as UAE talks continue

Bloomberg News on Jan 24, 2026

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Ukraine’s capital Kyiv suffered a massive drone and missile attack overnight as talks continued between U.S., Russian and Ukrainian representatives in the United Arab Emirates aimed at finding a path toward peace.

At least one person was killed in the assault and four were injured as strikes and falling debris sparked fires across multiple districts, and disrupted water and heating supplies in parts of the capital’s left bank of the Dnipro River, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in Telegram posts.

Emergency services were deployed citywide, with authorities urging residents to remain in shelters while air defenses operated.

Russia regularly targets Ukraine’s capital with strikes, which have left thousands of buildings without heating and basic amenities during freezing temperatures. The latest coincided with the trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi, which began on Friday and are expected to continue on Saturday.

The discussions follow months of U.S.-led negotiations in an attempt to kick-start peace talks between two sides. U.S. and Ukrainian officials earlier said they’ve made significant progress on a 20-point plan to end the conflict that’s lasted almost four years and spiraled into Europe’s biggest since World War II.

This week, President Donald Trump met his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at the Davos forum, while U.S. representatives Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before heading to Abu Dhabi.

The Ukrainian delegation in the UAE is led by National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov and the Russian team is headed by Igor Kostyukov, chief of the country’s military intelligence service.

Kyiv and Moscow remain at an impasse on key points, including Putin’s demands for parts of Ukraine that remain under Kyiv’s control in its eastern territory of Donbas’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.

The Kremlin made it clear after talks with the U.S. representatives that the “territorial issue” remains unresolved, raising questions about whether the Abu Dhabi meeting will yield any progress.

There is “no hope of achieving a long-term settlement” in the war until Russia’s demands for territory in Ukraine are accepted, Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said in an audio recording on Telegram early Friday.

Russia is insisting on securing what it calls the “Anchorage understandings” reached at Putin’s August summit with Trump in Alaska. That would require Ukraine to turn over the whole of Donetsk, while fighting would be frozen along the current lines of contact in the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Ukraine rejects demands to withdraw its forces from the heavily fortified areas of Donetsk that Putin’s military has failed to occupy in fighting that stretches back to 2014. U.S. proposals have suggested turning the unoccupied area into a de-militarized or free economic zone under special administration.

Late Friday Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post that it was too early to draw conclusions from the Abu Dhabi discussions, adding that the outcome would depend on how talks develop on Saturday. While Ukraine wants to end the war and achieve full security, he said, progress would require a similar willingness on the Russian side.