Deadly strikes hit Ukraine, occupied territories and Russia amid Chernobyl warnings

Ukrainian cities, occupied territory and Russian border regions were hit in a wave of strikes that killed at least 16 people, underscoring how the war’s reach has widened even as Chernobyl’s anniversary revived warnings about nuclear risk.

Dnipro took the heaviest toll. Regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said Sunday that the city’s death toll from Russian drone and missile strikes had risen to nine. In Russian-occupied Crimea, Moscow-installed authorities said a Ukrainian drone strike killed one man in Sevastopol. Leonid Pasechnik, the Russia-installed governor in Ukraine’s Luhansk region, said three people were killed in an overnight Ukrainian drone strike on a village, after he had reported two people killed in the early hours of Saturday.

Ukrainian officials did not comment on the claims from Crimea and Luhansk, and those attacks could not be independently verified. But the weekend violence cut in both directions. Local authorities in Russia’s Belgorod border region said a woman was killed in a Ukrainian drone attack there, and Ukraine’s General Staff said Ukrainian forces struck an oil refinery in Yaroslavl, deep inside Russian territory. The refinery processes 15 million tons of oil a year and produces gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for the Russian military.

The strikes landed as Ukrainians marked the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the April 26, 1986 reactor No. 4 explosion that sent radioactive fallout across much of Europe and remains the world’s worst nuclear accident. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russian attacks risk repeating history, saying Russian-Iranian Shahed drones regularly fly over the plant and that one struck the confinement last year. The International Atomic Energy Agency had already called the situation at Chernobyl “very, very dangerous” when Russian forces briefly occupied the site in 2022.

The fear is not abstract. About 2,250 people still work at Chernobyl, where the New Safe Confinement structure was built in 2016 and designed to last 100 years. After a drone strike in February 2025 damaged it, experts said repairs would be needed within the next few years, a reminder that the war’s danger footprint now extends far beyond the front line and into one of Europe’s most sensitive nuclear sites.