Russia Threatens 'Systematic' Strikes on Kyiv as EU Defies

Moscow spent the day pressing the threat it issued on Monday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the United States had not responded to Russia's warning that it was beginning "systematic strikes" on military-linked sites in Kyiv, declining to define the term beyond the gnomic "systematicity is not the same as periodicity." The warning, paired with a call for foreign nationals to leave the capital that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also relayed to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, drew open defiance. EU ambassador Katarina Mathernova said the bloc was "not going anywhere," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha branded Lavrov's threat a "brazen provocation," and the Institute for the Study of War assessed the campaign as posturing to recover from Russia's Victory Day humiliation rather than genuine retaliation for Ukraine's strike on a college in Starobilsk.

The diplomacy shifted to Berlin, where Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council secretary, Rustem Umerov, met national security advisers from Germany, France and the United Kingdom. The talks unfolded against friction between Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over Merz's proposal of EU associate membership for Ukraine, which Zelenskyy has rejected.

Ukraine answered the strike threat with displays of its own reach. At the Wild Drones exhibition, the firms GLEFA and Culver Aerospace unveiled the Behemoth, a Shahed-style loitering munition with a range of up to 300km and dual warheads, already in limited serial production. The Air Force said British-French Storm Shadow missiles had destroyed a Russian command-and-control post in occupied Luhansk on 25 May, part of what the analyst Nico Lange called regained momentum from long-range drone strikes on Russian oil infrastructure and targets deep inside Russia. Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert Brovdi added a warning that Ukraine had pre-marked 500 targets in Belarus should Minsk enter the war.

Russia's own fire kept landing on civilians and aid. A Russian Iskander ballistic missile destroyed a UN World Food Programme warehouse in Dnipro on 25 May, wiping out $1.4 million in food intended for 130,000 people in the second strike on the same site after a November 2025 drone attack; all staff survived. Reports from The Moscow Times and Russian search-trend data, meanwhile, pointed to a quiet expansion of Russian mobilization preparations amid heavy battlefield losses.