By Jekaterina Golubkova
June 15 (Reuters) - Six people were injured and the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, a symbol of Ukrainian spiritual and cultural history, caught fire following a Russian air attack on the Ukrainian capital, local authorities said early on Monday, urging residents to take shelter.
The air attack damaged electricity lines and left 140,000 Kyiv residents without power, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app, adding that houses and cars also caught fire after being
hit by drone debris.
The city's central Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was seriously damaged in a direct air attack, Tymur Tkachenko, the head of the capital's military administration, said in a separate Telegram post.
"A brutal assault on our people and our heritage. This is the true face of Russia's Orthodox values," Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said on X, with her post showing the monastery buildings in flames.
The city was under a massive missile attack with six people injured and a high-rise apartment building also on fire, according to Tkachenko.
Drones continue to attack Kyiv from different directions, Ukraine's Air Force said on Telegram, with explosions heard in the city, a Reuters witness said.
Neighbouring Poland, a European Union and a NATO member, has scrambled its fighter jets and put ground-based air defence systems and radar reconnaissance on a state of readiness, Poland's Armed Forces said in a post on X.
Most of Ukraine's territory was under air raid warnings in the early hours of Monday, with attacks also in the regions of Dnipro and Kharkiv, according to social media posts by local authorities.
Reuters could not independently confirm the reports.
The latest strikes come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday he had spoken to U.S. President Donald Trump and discussed efforts to achieve an end to the more than four-year war, ahead of a G7 meeting in France this week.
Trump told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday that ending the conflict in Ukraine was vital and he was ready to help, the Kremlin said.
Progress towards a peace agreement in Ukraine has been slow, with U.S. officials and mediators concentrating on the conflict in the Middle East. U.S. and Iranian officials said on Sunday they had agreed on a peace framework to end their war, with the pact expected to be officially signed on Friday in Switzerland.
(Reporting by Jekaterīna Golubkova in Tokyo; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Lincoln Feast)
