The FCDO advises against all travel to most of Ukraine, including Crimea and the area within fifty kilometres of the Belarus border in Volyn, Rivne and Zhytomyr. It advises against all but essential travel only to the western regions of Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Chernivtsi and Lviv, and to the parts of Volyn, Rivne and Zhytomyr more than fifty kilometres from the border. The advice, last updated on 14 August 2026, is explicit that missiles and drones hit unintended targets across the whole country, including the west.
Friday 21 August showed why. A Russian strike hit a shopping mall in Kryvyi Rih, in the Dnipro region, and a second strike landed about half an hour later while first responders were already working the scene. The UN's Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, Matthias Schmale, reported at least fourteen people killed and more than a hundred injured, including children, and said civilians and civilian objects must be protected and that indiscriminate attacks are prohibited under international humanitarian law.
The tactical lesson for protective teams is the double strike, not the mall. A delayed second round timed for responders is a recognised pattern, and it should shape how any incident near a crowded civilian site is handled. Do not commit everyone to a scene at once, hold a cordon and a staging point back from the point of impact, keep an alternate extraction route that does not funnel through the obvious approach, and brief that the safest moment is rarely the first quiet after a blast. The same discipline applies to venue selection: retail, transport hubs and other soft, crowded sites carry this risk anywhere in the country.
