World News
European leaders gather in Kyiv as Ukraine marks thirty five years of independence
By Staff Writer | 25 August 2026
Almost a dozen leaders stood at St Sophia Square on Monday. Two hundred miles north, a drone hit a nine storey block in Chernihiv at midday.
Ukraine marked the thirty fifth anniversary of its independence on Monday with almost a dozen European leaders in Kyiv, a parade of domestically built drones, and an air raid on a residential street in Chernihiv. Lawmakers voted to proclaim independence on 24 August 1991 and a nationwide referendum approved it later the same year.
President Volodymyr Zelensky told the gathering at St Sophia Square that the turnout said something about how the rest of the continent now reads the war.
No nation in a war like this could rely solely on its own weapons
Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine
He added that no nation could withstand attacks of that intensity without help from outside. The speeches were accompanied by a parade of weapons built inside the country, most of them drones, which is the part of the Ukrainian defence industry that has grown fastest.
What the visitors brought with them
The British prime minister, Andy Burnham, on his first trip abroad since taking office last month, co-chaired a meeting of the group of more than two dozen states that supports Ukraine. His government has agreed to let the manufacturer release classified information about British components in the SCALP long range missile, which is the French version of the British Storm Shadow and shares much of its technology. That clears a path for France and Ukraine to take forward plans to build the weapon in Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow viewed the plan extremely negatively and accused the United Kingdom of taking part in the war on Kyiv's side. The European Union cleared 7 billion dollars of defence loans on the same day.
A licence to disclose component data is the step that turns a supply relationship into a manufacturing one. It is a paperwork decision with a factory at the end of it.
The day on the ground
Chernihiv City Council said Russian forces sent three waves of attacks against the city and that a drone struck an apartment building during the final wave at about noon local time. Local authorities put the injured at twenty or more, including three children; the emergency service, on the account carried by the wire report, gave eighteen injured including two children. A fire broke out on the ground floor of a nine storey block.
Cynical strike by Russian terrorists on a residential building in Chernihiv
Viacheslav Chaus, Governor of Chernihiv Oblast
Chaus said police bomb disposal officers believed a jet powered drone had been used. In the southern Odesa region, regional authorities reported a large missile and drone attack on Monday in which food storage and energy infrastructure were among the targets.
Both sides also report striking economic targets rather than military ones. Ukraine's General Staff said its forces hit a state owned plant in the Rostov region that makes rocket and missile fuel, and Ukrainian drones struck logistics warehouses belonging to a Russian online retailer for a third day. Russia's children's rights ombudswoman, Maria Lvova-Belova, said three teenagers were killed and six children wounded at Krasnodar. Russia's Defence Ministry said its air defences destroyed 351 Ukrainian drones overnight across eight regions, Crimea and the Azov and Black seas. Neither origin read for this report was able to verify the other side's account, and both say so.
Why a repair bill matters more than a front line
For four years the front line has moved very little while the built environment behind it has taken the punishment. Warehouses, substations, water plants, food stores and housing blocks are now the routine targets on both sides of the border, which is a slower and more expensive form of war than the one either army was equipped for.
Anyone who eventually works on the reconstruction will inherit that arithmetic. A power grid struck repeatedly over four winters is not repaired by replacing what was lost; it has to be redesigned around the assumption that it will be struck again. The same is true of the housing stock in cities such as Chernihiv, where the damage is scattered across occupied buildings rather than concentrated on a site that can be cleared and started afresh.