The captain of an Antigua and Barbuda-flagged cargo ship was killed in a Russian attack in the Black Sea overnight, while seven people were injured in attacks targeting sites across Ukraine on Wednesday, 23 September 2026. The attacks coincided with an explosion near a railway station in the capital, Kyiv, according to the local newspaper Insider.
Captain killed and cargo ship crew evacuated
The Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority said the attack on the ship caused a fire, which response teams later managed to extinguish. In a statement on Telegram, the authority added that the cargo ship’s crew was evacuated after the attack, which killed the captain.
Oleh Kiper, governor of the Odesa region, said the Russian attacks had also struck civilian infrastructure, causing fires in warehouses containing medicines and food products. In the same region, storage buildings were targeted, triggering a fire that firefighters struggled to bring under control.
Efforts to extinguish the fire were complicated by repeated warnings of air attacks, as well as the building’s structure and the quantity of goods stored inside. These conditions did not prevent firefighters from continuing their operations at the targeted site.
Russian Defence Ministry announces targets of strikes
The Russian Defence Ministry, for its part, said its forces had carried out what it described as ‘mass strikes’ using drones overnight, saying the targets included ‘military-industrial and energy facilities, logistics centres and naval vessels’ in Ukraine. The ministry added that the strikes hit a storage facility and an industrial facility that it said were used to store and manufacture drones in Kyiv and the area around the capital.
The Kyiv city military administration reported that three people had been injured and that a warehouse in the Holosiivskyi district had been damaged and set on fire, while a fuel depot and an office building were also damaged. In the Zhytomyr region west of Kyiv, two people were injured in a Russian attack targeting a commercial facility, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service on Telegram.
Local authorities said the number of people injured in the attacks on companies and storage facilities in various Ukrainian regions had reached seven. Regarding Odesa, the Russian Defence Ministry said its forces had targeted three logistics centres used, according to its account, to store military equipment and dual-use equipment.
Russian national arrested on treason charges
It added that another storage facility in the wider Odesa region had been targeted, claiming that it was used to store drone components. Alongside the developments on the ground, Russia’s Federal Security Service announced the arrest of a Russian national in the Republic of Crimea, accusing him of organising a fundraising campaign for Ukrainian forces and sending information about air-defence systems and other military facilities to Ukrainian intelligence.
The service’s public relations centre said in a statement that the Federal Security Service in Crimea had ‘thwarted the illegal activities of a Russian national born in 1988, who is accused of high treason’. According to the Russian account, the detainee was a resident of the city of Kerch and had created a group on Telegram that included volunteers supporting Ukraine.
The statement said the suspect had organised fundraising operations and the purchase of equipment to meet the needs of the Ukrainian armed forces. It also accused him of sending data on the locations of air-defence systems and other military facilities on the peninsula to a bot on Telegram operated by Ukrainian intelligence.
The investigative committee of the Federal Security Service in Crimea and the city of Sevastopol opened a criminal case against him under Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code concerning high treason.
