Russia’s missile and drone attacks on Ukraine kill at least 21

By HANNA ARHIROVA, SAMYA KULLAB and ILLIA NOVIKOV

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia unleashed waves of missiles and drones at Ukraine early Monday, killing at least 21 people in attacks that exposed widening gaps in the country’s air defenses more than four years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion, authorities said.

All of the ballistic missiles launched by Russia struck their targets, underscoring Kyiv’s need for more U.S.-made Patriot interceptor missiles — a point Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will likely reiterate at a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, this week.

Fifteen people were killed in the capital of Kyiv, which was Russia’s main target, and 56 were injured, according to administrative head Tymur Tkachenko. Another six people were killed in the wider Kyiv region and 21 were inured, according to Mykola Kalashnyk, the head of the regional administration, and other emergency officials.

How Iran's new regime is very different to what came before

Paul Adams

When US President Donald Trump signed a ceasefire agreement with Iran during dinner at the Palace of Versailles last month, many saw an irony.

His host, French President Emanuel Macron, may have wanted to make sure the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed before Trump changed his mind, and possibly calculated that the gilded Hall of Mirrors would appeal to his guest.

But the choice of venue inevitably invited comparisons between the one-and-a-half page agreement and the extremely lengthy Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 at the end of World War One. The 1919 treaty reshaped Europe, but its demands for huge reparations left an angry and embittered Germany and helped to set the stage for another global conflagration just 20 years later.

Might the Iran deal, different in so many ways, nevertheless come to be seen as similarly fateful?

Almost three weeks later, a fragile ceasefire more or less holds. But after several skirmishes in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and with none of the issues that led to war anywhere close to being resolved, the situation in the Middle East looks every bit as precarious as it did before.

Meanwhile, Iran is in the midst of profound change.

The country is saying farewell to its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed more than four months ago in the devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes which began the war and decapitated much of the regime in Tehran.

Hundreds of Thousands Attend Ayatollah’s Funeral Procession

Huge crowds of mourners came to view the casket of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was exalted by some and despised by others. He was killed four months ago at the start of the U.S.-Israeli attacks.

Aaron Boxerman and Abdi Latif Dahir

Hundreds of thousands of mourners amassed in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Monday to commemorate Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, who ruled his country for decades with an iron fist before he was killed in the war with the United States and Israel.

The ayatollah’s body was carried through the city in a public procession in blistering heat, part of several ceremonies strictly choreographed by the Iranian government. Iranian officers fired water cannons into the crowd in an effort to cool the mourners down as temperatures soared to over 90 degrees.

Iran’s former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was killed in U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in February, will be buried on Thursday in the city of Mashhad, the final stop of a funeral procession that is expected to last six days and visit five cities.

Mashhad, a city of three million people in northeastern Iran, is the country’s second most populous city after Tehran and where Mr. Khamenei was born in 1939. Shiite Muslims revere it as Iran’s holiest city because of its close association with Imam Reza, one of twelve religious leaders considered by Shiites to be the spiritual heirs of the Prophet Muhammad.