LAGOS, Nigeria. (Voice Of Naija) Russia has bombed Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones in the early hours of Tuesday morning, September 8, killing at least two people and wounding ten others.
According to CNN, this puts an end to the three-day halt in strikes that President Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, had ordered to coincide with visits by US peace envoys.
CNN correspondents reportedly heard explosions ring out across the city in the early hours of Tuesday local time, just one day after US President Donald Trump’s envoys, senior adviser Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, completed visits to both Moscow and Kyiv over the weekend as part of a renewed American attempt to kickstart stalled peace talks.
Moscow’s military action this morning sent a clear message: the ceasefire ended the moment the diplomats left.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the overnight attack in a statement posted to X, saying: “It was a complex attack that the Russians tried to plan to cause as much harm to life as possible, using ballistic missiles, cruise and anti-ship missiles, and jet-powered Shahed drones.” Russia launched dozens of missiles and 166 drones at Ukraine during the overnight attack, Zelensky said.
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Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko confirmed the toll and the scale of destruction in the capital, saying the strikes had damaged residential buildings, administrative buildings, warehouses, schools, and structures across six districts of the city.
Fires broke out at multiple sites, including at an educational institution, emergency services said. Klitschko said people had been trapped inside a residential building and that rescue crews were working to extract them from the rubble.
Meduza, the independent Russian-language news outlet, reporting from Riga at 6:57 AM this morning, confirmed two people were killed, and two others were in serious condition.
According to Bloomberg, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry confirmed the same toll, noting the three-day pause in strikes which Putin had ordered to run through September 8 had now officially expired.
The Wall Street Journal, also reporting this morning, notes that Poland activated military aircraft to protect its own airspace given the scale of the attack, a step that underlines how quickly the conflict’s spillover risks can escalate.
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The Witkoff-Kushner mission, reported by France24 as the most significant direct US engagement with both capitals since Trump returned to the White House, appears to have produced no breakthrough.
Ukrainian officials, according to a CNN report, said the visit yielded no concrete progress on a ceasefire framework. Russia, for its part, has consistently demanded Ukrainian territorial concessions that Kyiv has publicly described as unacceptable.
The resumed strikes arrive against the backdrop of an ongoing war now in its fourth year, which has already killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced millions, and repeatedly tested the limits of Western military and diplomatic support for Ukraine.
Russia’s resumption of strikes on Kyiv has direct implications for the global grain and food security picture that Nigeria depends on.
Ukraine and Russia together account for a significant portion of the world’s wheat and sunflower oil exports, and every escalation in the war tightens those supply chains and drives up food import costs for countries across Africa, including Nigeria, where bread and cooking oil prices have already been elevated by years of conflict-linked disruption.
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Diplomatically, Nigeria’s non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council means Abuja will once again face pressure to take a public position on a conflict it has largely sought to navigate with caution.
The world’s most vulnerable nations, those facing food insecurity worsened by this very war, need countries like Nigeria to speak up clearly for international law, civilian protection, and a negotiated end to a conflict that is costing lives far beyond Ukraine’s borders.
