Power outages affected six regions; Kyiv bore the heaviest attack
Ukrainian officials reported one death and 24 injuries in Kyiv, one death and four injuries in Kharkiv, one death and five injuries in Sumy, and one death and one injury in Chernihiv. Those regional reports matched the overall toll of at least four deaths and 34 injuries.
The Kyiv City Military Administration said in an online update that Kyiv had come under the heaviest attack, with ballistic missiles hitting six districts and scores of drones striking the city. Four of the 24 people injured there were children.
In the Kharkiv region, one person was killed and four were injured, including two children, in a village just north of Lozova, the province’s second-largest city. In neighboring Sumy province, one person was killed and five were injured in a series of strikes. Banderol drone-launched missiles killed one person and injured another in Chernihiv, a city 90 miles northeast of Kyiv.
UA News reported that other Russian strikes targeting energy infrastructure left residents without power in Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Kharkiv and Kherson regions. The outages extended the attack’s reported effects beyond the four areas in which officials listed casualties.
One of the missiles, an Iskander, allegedly delivered a K5 cluster warhead, according to UPI. The munition was described as detonating dozens of individual bomblets before impact to inflict maximum damage over the widest possible area.
President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on his Telegram account: “Three waves of ballistic strikes were launched by Russian ‘humanists’ on Kyiv since last night.” He referenced comments by U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff during a Wednesday meeting with Vladimir Putin, in which Witkoff told the Russian president he was “a humanitarian.”
Witkoff’s praise came in response to the release of American Stephen Hubbard after four-and-half-years in Russian detention, according to UPI.
The attacks were launched after the Kremlin said it was open to resuming stalled peace talks. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he had held recent discussions with Putin “about settling this war with Ukraine, which I think we’re getting closer to, by the way, maybe now the closest we’ve been.”
MSI’s July 2 coverage described negotiations as remaining stalled. The Kremlin is now open to resuming peace talks, and President Donald Trump says the situation might be the closest yet, though overnight attacks still killed at least four and left residents without power across six regions.