Kyiv hit by some of the heaviest overnight attacks in months ahead of Trump-Zelenskyy meeting

(WASHINGTON) — A U.S. fighter jet appears to have been shot down by Iran over Iranian territory, American officials confirmed to ABC News, marking a new and potentially dangerous point in the conflict.

One crew member aboard the downed two-seater F-15E has been rescued, according to a U.S. official. The status of the other crew member is unknown, according to the official.

Combat search and rescue missions have become relatively rare for U.S. forces after more than a generation of near-total air dominance, with American aircraft typically operating with limited threats to aircraft in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The early indications that the U.S. fighter was brought down by enemy fire would mark the first time Iran has successfully downed a manned American aircraft in the war, which started in February.

There are photos of the fighter that were released by Iranian state media and could not be independently verified by ABC News.

President Donald Trump has been briefed on the matter, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. 

In late March, an American F-18 fighter jet narrowly dodged an Iranian surface-to-air missile, according to a U.S. official. Earlier that month, an American F-35, the Pentagon’s most advanced stealth fighter jet, had to make an emergency landing after being struck by Iranian fire. Three F-15s were also brought down over Kuwait in a friendly fire episode earlier in the war, though all six pilots ejected safely, according to U.S. officials.

The incident comes after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other U.S. officials have said that Iran’s military capabilities have been severely crippled and that the U.S. has “total air dominance” over Iran.

Trump, in a primetime address to the nation earlier this week, said the U.S. was “nearing completion” of its military objectives and that Tehran’s anti-aircraft abilities had been decimated.

“We’ve done all of it. Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Their missiles are just about used up or beaten,” Trump said in his speech on Wednesday night.

“They have no anti-aircraft equipment,” Trump added in his remarks. “Their radar is 100% annihilated. We are unstoppable as a military force.”

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has made a number of false claims about US aircraft being downed but the US has pushed back on those.

Iran has maintained at least some ability to continue with attacks targeting U.S. facilities in the Middle East and other countries in the region, wounding more than 300 U.S. service members, according to U.S. officials. The number of wounded has increased at a relatively steady rate each week, data reviewed by ABC News shows. Thirteen service members have been killed in action since the war began five weeks ago, according to U.S. Central Command.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(LONDON) — At least three people in Ukraine were killed in Russian overnight drone and missile strikes, the Interior Ministry in Kyiv reported on Monday, as Moscow continued its nightly long-range bombardment campaign.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 149 drones and 11 ballistic missiles into the country from Sunday evening into Monday morning, of which 116 drones and an undetermined number of missiles were shot down or suppressed. The air force said that the impacts of 23 drones and some missiles were recorded across 15 locations.

A woman and a 10-year-old boy were killed when a Russian drone hit the town of Bogodukhiv, around 35 miles northwest of the city of Kharkiv, the Interior Ministry said in a post to Telegram. Three other people were injured, it added.

Another person was killed by a Russian drone attack on the southern Black Sea port city of Odesa, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service (SES) said in a Telegram post. Two other people were injured, the SES said.

Elsewhere, the Interior Ministry said that nine people were injured by a Russian strike on a residential area in Shakhtarsk, in the central Dnipropetrovsk region.

The latest round of strikes came soon after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy again called for more Western aid to replenish and expand the country’s air defense network, which is called into service every night by long-range Russian attacks. 

On Sunday, several Russian ballistic missiles struck Kyiv, Zelenskyy said. “Each of our partners must recognize their strength, their ability to support Ukraine and protect lives,” the Ukrainian president said in posts to social media. 

“Missiles for air defense are needed every single day. Protection against Russian ballistic attacks is needed every single day,” Zelenskyy added. “No country in the world should be left alone and without assistance under such strikes and in such a war.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its forces shot down at least 71 Ukrainian drones overnight into Monday morning.

Flight operations at two airports — one in Russia’s southern city of Volgograd and the other in the western city of Kaluga — were temporarily paused, Russia’s federal air transport agency said.

Zelenskyy on Sunday defended Ukraine’s attacks deep inside Russia. Kyiv has said in recent months that its drone and missile strikes are focused on the Russian energy sector, which Zelenskyy described as “a legitimate target.”

“We do not have to choose whether we strike a military target or energy,” Zelenskyy said while addressing students at the National Aviation University in Kyiv. “He sells this energy. He sells oil. So is it energy, or is it a military target? Honestly, it’s the same thing. He sells oil, takes the money, invests it in weapons. And with those weapons, he kills Ukrainians.”

Zelenskyy said that left Ukraine with two options: “We either build weapons and strike their weapons. Or we strike the source where their money is generated and multiplied. And that source is their energy sector. That is what is happening. All of this is a legitimate target for us.”

Both sides have continued long-range strikes despite recent U.S.-led peace efforts. Last week saw American, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators meet for a second round of trilateral talks in the United Arab Emirates, with all three participants describing the meetings as productive.

But the talks did not appear to achieve a breakthrough on several contentious points. Among the most difficult are the fate of Ukraine’s partially-occupied eastern Donbas region, the nature of post-war Western security guarantees for Ukraine and control of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the south of the country.

On Friday, Zelenskyy told journalists that the U.S. proposed hosting the next round of trilateral talks, “likely in Miami, in a week.” Zelenskyy said the Ukrainian side “confirmed our participation.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, said in an interview with the TV BRICS outlet that Moscow sees no “bright future” in its future economic relations with the U.S.

U.S. President Donald Trump, presidential peace envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev — who is also the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — have all suggested that a peace deal in Ukraine could facilitate a lucrative new era for American-Russian economic cooperation.

But Lavrov alleged that the U.S. had “declared their goal of economic dominance,” according to quotes published by the state-run Tass news agency.

Lavrov also explicitly criticized Trump’s administration for failing to roll back the punitive sanctions imposed on Moscow as a response to its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an operation that followed eight years of aggression beginning with Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.

Trump has threatened more sanctions and tariffs on Russia if Moscow fails to make a deal with Ukraine to end its war, which this month will turn four years old.

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(LONDON) — As the internet blackout in Iran appears to be easing after weeks of protests across the country, the scale of the Islamic Republic regime’s bloodiest crackdown in decades is now being made public, according to activist groups.

More than 5,700 protesters have been killed since Jan. 8, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, an Iran-focused activist group based in the U.S.

More than 17,000 other related death cases are still under review, the group said. That U.S.-based group relies on a network of activists in Iran for its reporting and has been known to be accurate during previous unrest. While ABC News cannot confirm the number independently, the true toll might be even higher, according to other sources.

What began in Tehran late December in response to the collapse in currency and economic conditions quickly took on a political character — with crowds on the streets openly calling for regime change.

In response, the Iranian authorities launched a brutal crackdown on protests, according to observers.

Those protests intensified on Jan. 8 after a public call for protests from exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-based son of the former shah of Iran.

Internet and telephone access across Iran was cut on Jan. 8, and the country went through its longest digital blackout in its history, isolating protesters from the rest of the world. NetBlocks, an independent tracking company, said on Sunday that the general outages had stretched past 400 hours. The company said service had been intermittently restored for some users in recent days.

With the partial restoration of internet access, people inside the country and others who have left in recent days shared videos and stories with ABC News that shows the horrific nature of the regime’s suppression of the protests.

Eyewitnesses from other cities also described what they had seen as a “war situation,” with some using terms such as “massacre,” “bloodbath” and “apocalypse,” in accounts shared with ABC News.

Saman, who asked ABC News not to use his full name for fear of his safety, was in Rasht — the largest city on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast — when the major protests formed.

As tens of thousands of protesters were taking over streets of the city on Jan. 8, the regime’s forces set the iconic bazaar of the city on fire after shop owners refused to end their strikes and had joined protesters, Saman told ABC News in a telephone interview.

While many protesters and non-protesters were still inside the bazaar area, the flames spread, he said. As people fled, government forces closed off the main exits of the market toward the street and directly shot at people trying to flee the flames, Saman said.

“There was smoke everywhere, a huge fire was there,” Saman said. “As people were going to leave, they shot them all. Maybe some of them were not even protesters. And some were normal people who had raised their hands up.”

Satellite images reviewed by ABC News show visible fire damage at the site of Rasht’s bazaar after Jan 8.

Saman said some of the wounded who were hospitalized, including one of his friends who was shot in his calf, were then taken into custody by the regime’s forces. It’s unclear where they’re being held or whether they’re still alive, he said.

While the deadly crackdown appeared to have quelled the protests and the streets now appear to have been emptied of people, families of the dead and missing, as well as families of the injured protesters, have been left in a state of confusion — scouring morgues, hospitals and prisons in a desperate attempt to find their loved ones, according to people who’ve spoken with ABC News.

Some of the people who were protesting on Jan. 8 have not returned, Saman said.

The regime’s forces “are very strict in returning corpses,” Saman told ABC News. “Some people have really disappeared.”

Saman said the regime’s forces gunned down two of his friend’s sons. He said his friend described an unimaginable scene when he went to collect the bodies from a street corner of the city’s cemetery.

The regime’s forces “had loaded bodies in freight trucks,” Saman said. “Corpses all stripped, corpses of all the girls and boys had been dumped at one corner of Rasht’s Bagh-e Rezvan [the city’s cemetery] where bodies were handed over to the families.”

Martial law remains in force across Iran, according to people ABC News spoke with. Families of victims have told ABC News they have been warned by the regime’s authorities not to hold funerals for their loved ones because those events have proved to be lightning rods for further protests in the past.

“Everyone has either lost someone in their circle, or knows someone who has,” Hadi, who also did not want to use his full name for security concerns, told ABC News. He said he left the country on Wednesday.

“There is fear and pain in the air,” he said. “Anti-riot vehicles at the junctions and anti-riot police in all streets.”

With journalists and international observers denied access to Iran during the wave of protests, the reported estimates of the death toll have varied. But the numbers have been steadily climbing as a network of international nongovernmental organizations has worked to verify the scale of the crackdown. The regime’s forces “are very strict in returning corpses,” Saman told ABC News. “Some people have really disappeared.” Some families have reportedly been asked to pay for their loved ones’ bodies when they’ve attempted to retrieve them from the morgue.

Though Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, described on Friday the protests as a “terrorist operation,” saying the death toll amounted to 3,117 civilians, 2,427 members of the security forces and 690 “terrorists.”

The Iranian regime has been accusing American and Israeli agents of killing protestors and warned the U.S. of any intervention.

However, President Donald Trump said the United States has an aircraft carrier “armada” heading toward Iran, adding that he hopes he would not need to use it. His remarks come after he had warned the Iranian regime not to kill protestors.

“Iran’s message to President Trump is clear: The U.S. has tried every conceivable hostile act, from sanctions and cyber assaults to outright military attack — and, most recently, it clearly fanned a major terrorist operation — all of which failed,” Araghchi said on social media. “It is time to think differently. Try respect.”

Amid the rising tensions between the political authorities of the two countries, many Iranians express on their social media that they feel there is no option left for them to get free from the brutality of the autocratic regime except for foreign intervention. They openly say the only way out of the deadlock is a U.S. military intervention to take the regime down.

However, still some others doubt the idea, saying foreign intervention might push the country towards more chaos in long term.

“For the Iranian government, confronting an external enemy is far easier than confronting its own people,” Omid Memarian, a journalist and analyst, wrote in The Atlantic. “Domestic protests threaten internal cohesion; war produces unity.”

Memarian added that, if Trump “follows through” with his threats “but still fails to fracture Iran’s machinery of repression, then he should expect to perversely strengthen the regime’s base, which will believe it is justified in even greater violence against the country’s civilians.”

Regardless of one’s stance on foreign intervention, most Iranians are still reeling from the terror and despair they have experienced since late December.

“It was a war,” Saman said. “The regime’s war against its own people. People were unarmed, but they came with their machine guns.”

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