Russia attacked Ukraine with missiles and drones, killing at least eight people in Kyiv and the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian officials said.
The attacks early on September 24 came hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking at the annual UN General Assembly meeting in New York, called on the world to step up pressure on Russia.
"A war that was not prevented in time, was not stopped in time, and for which Russia was not punished in time, keeps spreading," Zelenskyy said of the full-scale invasion Russian President Vladimir Putin launched in February 2022, warning that Moscow's aggression is not limited to Ukraine.
"The more freedom Putin has to act, the more dangerous the world becomes for everyone else," he said.
In Europe and elsewhere in the West, there has been increasing concern over drone incidents, acts of sabotage, and other evidence of "hybrid warfare" attacks carried out by or blamed on Russia, as well as over the possibility that Moscow could launch a military attack on a NATO nation.
Poland's digital affairs minister suggested Russia could have been behind a fire that broke out late on September 23 at a Starlink satellite communications station in central Poland that, among other things, transmits Internet traffic through Poland to Ukraine and other countries.
"This act of sabotage was deliberately designed to disable the station...disrupting Internet access for various institutions, including the Ukrainian Army," Krzysztof Gawkowski told Polish public broadcaster TVP Info. He said the station was still operational.
"There is much to suggest that we are dealing with an element of the next phase of hybrid warfare," Gawkowski said, adding that "many indications suggest that it fits into this new Russian doctrine of attack."
Meanwhile, in an updated assessment of the threat from Russia, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (DDIS) said Moscow is likely to intensify hybrid attacks against targets in the West, possibly including cyberattacks intended to "cripple critical societal functions."
It said that while hybrid attacks had "mainly been aimed at creating fear and weakening public support for aid to Ukraine," they have begun to include efforts to prevent support from reaching Ukraine, such as sabotage against defense companies or trains carrying military equipment.
In addition, DDIS chief Thomas Ahrenkiel said there is "a low but growing risk that Russia will launch a limited military attack against one or several NATO countries bordering Russia."
The agency still believes it is "highly unlikely that Russia would see any interest in invading a NATO country, but we cannot rule it out," he told a press conference on September 24.
In Ukraine, six people were killed and 10 injured in an overnight Russian drone strike on a farm in the eastern Kharkiv region, Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskiy and senior regional official Oleh Synyehubov said. Koretskiy initially said seven were killed but later revised the death toll to six.
In Kyiv, two people were killed in ballistic missile strikes, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said, and emergency authorities said 10 others were injured.
One of those killed died in a parking lot near a maternity hospital in the Podil district that was damaged by missile fragments, Klitschko said.
The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia fired Zircon anti-ship missiles, Iskander ballistic missiles, and 282 drones in the overnight strikes, which it said mainly targeted Kyiv and the Odesa region in the south. Russia has been hammering Ukraine's capital with attacks on a nearly daily basis for weeks.
The September 24 strikes began not long after midnight, and Zelenskyy suggested they started while he was meeting with US lawmakers to discuss sanctions against Russia, including legislation that US President Donald Trump signed on September 18 and is aimed at increasing economic pressure.
"Russia will not end this war without pressure," Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post. He emphasized the need for more air defense systems.
Ukraine is suffering from a shortage of systems such as the US-made Patriot, in part due to the US focus on the war with Iran that began in February, and Zelenskyy emphasized that Kyiv needs more.
"Each such attack is due to the fact that the pressure on the aggressor has not become total and Russia believes that it can continue to rely on ballistic terror," he said. "Now the United States has the opportunity to react strongly. We need ballistic interceptors to protect lives."
Zeelsnkyy met with Trump on September 22 on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly.
Trump, who made ending Russia's war against Ukraine a priority when he took office for a second time in January 2025, said that peace could come "sooner than people think," while Zelenskyy said it would be preferable if the war could end before the onset of winter.
Putin has given no sign he is ready to end the invasion without capturing the entirety of the eastern Donetsk region at a minimum.
"For almost five years now, Russian generals have been trying to carry out Putin's crazy order to seize our eastern land, the Donetsk region," Zelenskyy told the General Assembly.
Noting Russia's massive losses, he said, "It's madness.... But they still keep going."
Russia has rejected calls for a cease-fire. At the UN Security Council after a meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in New York on September 23, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia would not halt attacks while any peace talks were under way.
"We will not pause the special military operation for the duration of negotiations, regardless of the format," he said, using the Kremlin's term for Russia's war on Ukraine.
Rubio said that the United States has invited Putin to attend the Group of 20 summit in Miami in December. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on September 24 that Russia appreciates and values the "kind invitation" but that Putin had not yet decided whether to make the trip.
It would be Putin's first trip to the United States since he and Trump held a summit in Alaska in August 2025 and emerged with conflicting interpretations about what, if anything, was agreed upon about Russia's war on Ukraine. Putin has not attended a G20 summit in person since 2019.
Asked whether the EU would participate if Putin attends, European Commission spokesman Olof Gill said that "the G20 is a key forum for addressing existing and emerging global challenges, some of which have been created precisely by Russia's war against Ukraine," and that "Russia is escalating attacks on Ukrainian civilians as we speak."
"Since 2022, the EU has consistently and forcefully used G20 meetings to condemn Russia's full scale invasion and to call for it to end," Gill told reporters. "What I can say today is that this approach, from the European Union perspective, will continue, irrespective of the participants at any G20 meeting."
