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Missiles, diplomacy and a day of contrasts
Summary
On 8 July 2024 a deadly Russian strike on Ukrainian cities coincided with visits and agreements that pulled in different directions.
What did diplomacy look like on 8 July 2024, the day Russia launched one of its largest missile attacks on Ukrainian cities? It looked fragmented: leaders in Warsaw, Moscow and Beijing pursued separate agendas while Ukrainians counted their dead.
The strike
Russia fired a massive missile attack on residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in cities across Ukraine, including the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv. At least 47 people were killed and 189 injured, as reported at the time. Later accounts describe more than forty missiles hitting Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro, Kropyvnytskyi and Pokrovsk.
Warsaw: a security answer
On the same day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk signed a security agreement in Warsaw. It allows Poland to shoot down Russian missiles inside Ukrainian airspace. Set beside the day's strikes, the deal showed the practical question facing Kyiv's partners: how far they would go to protect Ukrainian skies.
Moscow and Beijing: other priorities
The diplomatic traffic elsewhere ran differently. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Moscow, his first visit to Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion. Meanwhile Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made an unannounced "peace mission" to Beijing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, after an unannounced meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the preceding Friday.
Orbán's trip was one of several uncoordinated meetings he described as peace missions. Later accounts say they also included a visit to Kyiv to see Zelenskyy before Moscow, and a planned trip to the United States for the Washington summit and a meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. They took place as China deepened diplomatic ties with Russia amid European Union and United States sanctions.
What the day showed
The contrast was stark. Poland committed to a concrete defensive arrangement with Ukraine. Other visits involved leaders engaging with Moscow and Beijing while missiles struck civilian sites, including a children's hospital in the Ukrainian capital. Whether such contacts could produce movement toward peace was a question the day's events left open; what they did establish was that Russian strikes continued in parallel with the diplomacy.
