Missiles target Kyiv as visiting African leaders push Ukraine and Russia for peace and grain

“Russian missiles are a message to Africa: Russia wants more war, not peace,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted.

A delegation of leaders and senior officials from Africa arrived in Ukraine seeking ways to end the invaded country's nearly 16-month war with Russia and to ensure food and fertilizer deliveries to their continent, though an air raid in Kyiv during their Friday trip provided a reminder of the challenges they face.

The delegation including the presidents of South Africa, Senegal, Zambia and the Comoros Islands first went to Bucha, a Kyiv suburb where bodies of civilians lay scattered in the streets last year after Russian troops abandoned a campaign to seize the capital and withdrew from the area.

The delegation's stop in Bucha was symbolically significant, as the town's name has come to stand for the brutality of Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Russian occupation of Bucha left hundreds of civilians dead in the streets and in mass graves. Some showed signs of torture.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to separate meetings with members of an African peace mission.

The delegation was set to travel to St. Petersburg later Friday, where Russia’s top international economic conference is taking place, and meet with Putin on Saturday. It includes senior officials from Uganda, Egypt, the Republic of the Congo as well as South Africa, Zambia, Senegal, and Comoros.

While in Bucha, the visitors placed commemorative candles at a small memorial outside St. Andrew’s Church, near one of the locations where a mass grave was unearthed.

Shortly after, air raid sirens began to wail in Ukraine's capital. Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported an explosion in the Podilskiy district, one of the city's oldest neighborhoods.