Several explosions were heard early this morning in Kyiv - a week after Russian strikes on the city. According to Andriy Yermak, head of the office of the Ukrainian president, the centre of the capital was hit by kamikaze drones. No casualties were reported. President Volodymyr Zelensky announced intense fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces around two cities in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

The former commander of American forces in Europe, Gen. Ben Hodges, predicts that the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula could be liberated by the summer of next year. "The situation of the Russians is getting worse every week," he said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. According to him, if the Russians do not lose the war, they will try to attack again in 2-3 years.

Russian soldiers shot dead a Ukrainian orchestral conductor at his home after he refused to participate in a concert in occupied Kherson, Ukraine's Ministry of Culture said. Yuriy Kerpatenko refused to conduct a performance at an event announced by the occupiers as a demonstration of the so-called improving peaceful life in Kherson. "One of the main components of the Soviet policy is the destruction of the culture of the enslaved countries - murders of cultural figures, purging of libraries, banning of national languages. Modern occupiers fully follow this strategy. And when our territories are de-occupied, we will learn about dozens and hundreds of such terrible stories", commented the Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Mikhed, who joined the army at the beginning of the war.