2025

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia attacked Ukraine’s capital with missiles and drones on Saturday, killing at least one person and wounding 27, a day before talks between Ukraine and the U.S., authorities said.

Explosions boomed across Kyiv as ballistic missiles and drones hit the city. The attack began in the early morning and continued for hours.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy prepared to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump in Florida on Sunday for further talks on ending the nearly four-year war. Zelenskyy told reporters he was on a plane en route to the United States on Saturday afternoon, and would make a stopover in Canada to meet with Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Zelenskyy said that he and Trump plan to discuss several issues, including security guarantees and territorial issues in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday that it carried out a “massive strike” overnight, using “long-range precision-guided weapons from land, air and sea, including Kinzhal hypersonic aeroballistic missiles” and drones. It said it targeted energy infrastructure facilities used by Ukraine’s forces and military-industrial enterprises.

But several residential buildings were struck in Moscow’s attack.

The ministry said that the strike came in response to Ukraine’s attacks on “civilian objects” in Russia.

Earlier on Saturday, the ministry said that its air defenses shot down seven Ukrainian drones over the Russian regions of Krasnodar and Adygeya overnight. On Saturday afternoon, the ministry reported that 147 more drones were shot down over a number of Russian regions.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that air defenses intercepted more than 20 drones “flying towards” the Russian capital on Saturday. He didn’t report any damage or casualties. It wasn’t immediately clear whether those were included in the Defense Ministry’s count.

Poland scrambled fighter jets and closed airports in Lublin and Rzeszow near the border with Ukraine for several hours during the Russian attacks, the country’s armed forces command said on X. There was no violation of Polish airspace, it said.

Civil aviation authority Pansa said the two airports had since resumed operations. It was unclear what caused the alert in Poland when the Russian attacks were focused on Kyiv, which is far from the border.

Russia targeted Ukraine with 519 drones and 40 missiles, Ukraine’s air force said. The main target was energy and civilian infrastructure in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said. In some districts of the region there is no electricity or heating because of the attacks, he said.

“Today Russia demonstrated how it responds to peace talks between Ukraine and the United States on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine. They carried out massive attacks on Ukraine precisely as we move toward peace negotiations,” Zelenskyy told reporters by audio note while traveling. “That is Russia’s response.”

More than 10 residential buildings were damaged, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said in a post on Telegram. People were being evacuated from under the rubble of collapsed buildings.

Olena Karpenko, 52, heard a man as he burned to death in the attack. “His scream is still in my ears. I can’t believe it,” she said, weeping.

Karpenko said they heard a sudden explosion at the nearby thermal power plant, followed by a stronger blast that shook the windows of her home. Then came the strike on her building.

“I saw how the apartment was burning, there was a fire and we heard a man’s screams, begging for help,” she said.

Two children were among those wounded in the attack, which hit seven locations across the capital, the head of the Kyiv Military Administration, Tymur Tkachenko, in a statement on Telegram. A body was found under the rubble of one damaged building, he said.

“In fact, the entire center of Kyiv was under attack by drones,” he said, adding that Russia was sending a message that “it is raising the stakes in this war.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if the person found under the rubble was the man who burned to death.

A fire broke out in an 18-story residential building in the Dnipro district of the city, and emergency crews rushed to the scene to contain the flames. A 24-story residential building in the Darnytsia district was also hit, Tkachenko said, and more fires broke out in the Obolonskyi and Holosiivsky districts.

In the wider Kyiv region, the strikes hit industrial and residential buildings, according to Ukraine’s Emergency Service. In the Vyshhorod area, emergency crews rescued one person found under the rubble of a destroyed house.

Zelenskyy told reporters he would aim to ensure there were “ as few unresolved issues as possible ” in talks with Trump while respecting Ukraine’s red lines.

“I am confident there are compromise proposals — we know the Americans — and, obviously, our enemy also always has its own goals, which we know well,” he said, speaking by audio note in a Whatsapp chat with journalists.

Zelenskyy said he would prioritize discussing security guarantees for Ukraine. He has said that in the draft peace plan, the U.S. has committed to providing guarantees that mirror the NATO alliance’s Article 5, which means an attack on Ukraine would trigger a collective military response from the U.S. and its allies. But key details must be worked out in a bilateral agreement.

Territorial concessions are the most sensitive of issues the two leaders will discuss, including the Donetsk region and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Zelenskyy reiterated that Ukraine would never recognize any territory as Russian “under any circumstances.”

“But the most important issue I want to stress today is security guarantees. Beyond territorial issues and the ZNPP (nuclear plant), security guarantees are critically important for us,” he said.

Zelenskyy also will speak to European leaders online to brief them on the discussions.

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Dasha Litvinova contributed to this report from Tallinn, Estonia.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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By Abhirup Roy

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 27 (Reuters) – A widespread power outage in San Francisco that led to Waymo robotaxis stalling and snarling traffic earlier this month has raised concerns about the readiness of autonomous vehicle operators to tackle major emergencies like earthquakes and floods.

Driverless taxis from Alphabet unit Waymo, a ubiquitous feature on the city’s streets, were stuck at intersections with their hazard lights turned on as traffic lights stopped working following a fire at a PG&E substation that knocked out power to roughly one-third of the city on December 20, videos posted on social media showed. Waymo halted operations, resuming a day later.

The incident has renewed calls for stricter regulation of the nascent but fast-growing industry as other companies including Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox race to expand robotaxi services in several cities.  

“If you get a response to a blackout wrong, regulators are derelict if they do not respond to that by requiring some sort of proof that the earthquake scenario will be handled properly,” said Philip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-engineering professor and autonomous-technology expert.

In a statement on Tuesday, Waymo said that while its robotaxis are designed to handle non-operational traffic signals as four-way stops, they occasionally request a confirmation check. Though the vehicles successfully traversed more than 7,000 darkened signals on Saturday, “the outage created a concentrated spike” in confirmation requests that “led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets,” Waymo said.

Robotaxi operators around the globe use remote access by humans – known in the industry as “teleoperation” – in varying degrees to monitor and control vehicles. Waymo, for example, has a team of human “fleet response” agents who respond to questions from the Waymo Driver, its bot, when it encounters a particular situation.

But such remote assistance has its limitations, and the Waymo outage highlights the need to regulate how robotaxi operators use the technology, said Missy Cummings, director of the George Mason University Autonomy and Robotics Center and former adviser to the U.S. road safety regulator.

“The whole point of having remote operations is for humans to be there when the system is not responsive in the way it should be,” she said. “The federal government needs to regulate remote operations,” Cummings said. “They need to make sure that there’s backup remote operations when there’s some kind of catastrophic failure.” 

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles and the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulate and issue permits for the testing and commercial deployment of robotaxis, have said they are looking into the incident.

The DMV said it was talking to Waymo and other autonomous vehicle makers about actions related to emergency response. It also said it was formulating regulations to ensure remote drivers “meet high standards for safety, accountability and responsiveness.”

‘A SHOT ACROSS THE BOW’

Deploying and commercializing fully autonomous vehicles have been harder than expected with high investments to ensure the technology is safe and public outcry after collisions forcing many to shut shop.

Following a high-profile accident in 2023 when a robotaxi from General Motors’ Cruise dragged a pedestrian, regulators revoked its permit, eventually leading the company to cease operations.

But robotaxis have returned to the spotlight with Tesla rolling out its service in Austin, Texas earlier this year and CEO Elon Musk promising rapid expansion. Waymo, which has grown slowly and steadily over the years since its launch as Google’s self-driving project in 2009, has also accelerated expansion. 

With a fleet of more than 2,500 vehicles, Waymo operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Metro Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta.

The company said the confirmation processes its vehicles follow were established during early deployment and that it was now refining them to match its current scale. Waymo is implementing fleet-wide updates that provide vehicles with “specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.”

Both Cummings and Koopman said robotaxi operators should face additional permitting requirements once their fleets grow beyond a certain size to ensure that they have adequate capabilities to deal with large-scale failures.

“If this had been an earthquake, it would have been a problem,” Koopman said. “This is just a shot across the bow.” 

(Reporting by Abhirup Roy in San Francisco; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Alistair Bell)

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