Missiles on a campus at night, a truce in Oleshky at three

Russian ballistic missiles struck Kyiv late on Monday. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said one person was killed and at least 10 injured, “most of whom were students from a university dormitory”²; The Guardian’s tally, from earlier figures, is one dead and eight wounded¹. The university was the State University of Trade and Economics, which has more than 15,000 students². Klitschko said a blast wave shattered windows in an intensive care unit, and on Tuesday that a strike hit the Southern Bridge over the Dnipro, damaging metro infrastructure; trains across it were suspended¹.

“The missiles hit very crowded areas, and there is not a single military facility nearby,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote¹.

The truce, on paper. Hours later, at 03:00 local time (02:00 CET), a truce was due to start in Oleshky, a Russian-occupied city in Kherson region where residents have reported months of food, water and medicine shortages¹. It is meant to let humanitarian aid in. No end date has been given, and neither Russia, Ukraine nor the US has said who will monitor it¹. Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday it would halt fire in the “Kherson sector” for its duration¹.

The paperwork that matters. Before the strikes, Zelensky said Ukraine had waited “nearly a month” for US defence secretary Pete Hegseth to sign off on missiles for Patriot and NASAMS air-defence systems¹. RFE/RL reports a bipartisan group of US lawmakers pressing the White House on Ukraine’s access to military and intelligence support².

You can read the night two ways: as proof that truces mean nothing, or as a small local agreement arriving despite everything. The honest reading is narrower. A truce is a set of checkable facts: trucks in, people out, guns quiet, someone writing it down. Until those facts are reported, it is a date on a calendar.