Ukraine Cancels Parliament Session, Citing a Warning Over a Missile Attack

Ukraine’s Parliament canceled a session on Friday over a warning that Russia could target the building in an attack with a missile that Ukraine’s air defenses cannot shoot down, lawmakers said.

Although they did not say which type of missile they were worried about, the decision to cancel the session came a day after Russia fired what it described as a new, intermediate-range missile. Ukraine has no radars capable of detecting those missiles in flight through the upper atmosphere, nor air defense systems capable of shooting them down, Ukrainian experts have said.

Since the start of the war, Parliament has continued meeting in its chambers, even in the first months of the conflict, when Russian forces were just 12 miles from the center of the capital. But on Friday, Parliament decided not to take the risk.

“They canceled it late last night, citing the danger of a missile strike,” Oleksiy Honcharenko, an opposition member of Parliament, said of the planned session.

The intermediate-range missile launched Thursday carried conventional warheads, but it is also capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and analysts and Western officials said the purpose was to instill fear in Ukraine and the West.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday said his forces used the missile in response to Ukraine’s using American and British weapons in strikes further into Russia.

“The world must respond,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X Thursday evening. “Right now there is no strong reaction from the world. Putin is very sensitive to this. He is testing you, dear partners.”

At Ukraine’s request, NATO is planning to hold an emergency meeting of ambassadors on Tuesday to discuss the recent strikes as well as the general battlefield situation, a NATO official said.

With Thursday’s missile attack, a new wave of worry has gripped Ukraine, already unnerved by Russia’s continual strikes on Ukrainian cities and its daily advances at the front line.

“Putin makes a lot of threats,” said Oleksii Sheka, 53, rushing across a windy St. Sophia Square in central Kyiv on Friday. “A strike on Kyiv is now possible, but I wouldn’t want for it all to end like this.”

In Thursday’s attack on Dnipro, in central Ukraine, Russian forces also used a Kinzhal missile. The Kinzhals can be shot down with Patriot air defense missiles.

Also on Thursday, Russia carried out a ballistic missile attack on the city of Kryvyi Rih, with models of missiles used earlier in the war. The attack injured 31 people and damaged residential buildings, local authorities reported.

And overnight on Thursday into Friday, after a three-month long chain of missile and drone attacks, the city of Sumy in northern Ukraine was targeted again. This time it was attacked with drones, leaving two people dead and 12 injured.

In addition, Russia overnight occupied another village in the Donetsk region: the small settlement of Dalnie, south of the town of Kurakhove. That town has been an important logistics hub for Ukrainian forces but now is about 70 percent surrounded by Russian troops advancing both to the north and to the south.

Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Steven Erlanger from Berlin.