MILAN (AP) — The Milan Olympic Village was coming alive on Sunday as athletes laden with gear rolled into a brand-new complex where they will sleep, eat meals, work out and mix with other competitors for the next three weeks.
Members of Team Canada were doing security with their suitcases from Canada's own lululemon, and Team France, decked out in Le Coq Sportif uniforms, received a pep talk before ascending to their 6th-floor rooms. Dutch speedskater Jutta Leerdam filmed a TikTok in front of the Olympic rings inside the village.
The Milan village, which will house 1,500 athletes and team members during the Feb. 6-22 Winter Games, will be officially inaugurated Monday by International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry. But it has been buzzing to life for days as athletes have moved in.
Teams have decked out their room windows with national flags and symbols: Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, among others, are already making their presence known. China added a friendly panda, while Team USA hung a pair of four-story-tall banners featuring the Stars and Stripes.
Athletes eat in a cavernous dining center run by Italian caterers offering a range of healthy, local choices. Lunch on Sunday featured chicken, pork and turkey and a variety of fish, including two kinds of salmon and hake. Italian specialties like pasta could be dressed in red sauce or meat ragu. Pizza and focaccia were also on offer, as well as gluten-free options. Salad bars included legumes and nuts.
The athletes' rooms were practical and equipped with the essentials. A single bed fit atop storage cubbies for suitcases and gear, while a stand-alone closet was stocked with a drying rack, pack of hangers, a laundry bag, a dry mop and extension cord. In the era of electronics, the room itself was outfitted with another four outlets -- one next to the bed included two USB ports.
The only design accent in the sample room on Sunday's tour were a sage green bedside table, bathroom shelf and coat hook to match the painted concrete floor. One team was later seen bringing in mattress toppers from IKEA, while the Japanese team added futons.
A full-length mirror hung outside of the bathroom, which featured the usual shower (reported to have good water pressure), toilet and sink -- plus the very Italian bidet, or low porcelain sink that complements toilet paper with a clean rinse. The fixture is de rigueur in Italian residences but often perplexes visitors — including some athletes whose room videos have done double-takes.
On the floor for Team France, diagrams next to the elevator instructed athletes on which uniforms to wear alternatively for the opening ceremony, news conferences, the medal podium, the closing ceremony and finally, the trip home. The ceremonial side of the Olympic journey, in five diagrams.
IOC partners have filled the village with activities for the athletes.
Technogym has outfitted a gym with its latest equipment, including a Pilates machine. Powerade is backing a mind center where athletes can meditate, do yoga or just talk to the trained volunteers; Coca-Cola has stacked a recreational area with foosball, air hockey, and a photo booth as well as TV sets. A pair of Czech Republic athletes took advantage of the cosmetic brand Kiko's free 10-minute makeup sessions.
When athletes arrive, they receive a free folding Samsung Galaxy Z Flip7 special edition phone only for competitors, decorated with the Olympic laurels.
Artificial intelligence is also entering one of the Olympics favorite spaces: pin trading. Athletes can trade pins by putting one of their own into a plastic ball, and then use AI powered by Chinese multinational Alibaba to instruct a robotic arm to randomly pick a new pin.
The village, across from the Fondazione Prada exhibition complex and in an area attracting other luxury brand headquarters, will be an Olympic legacy to the city. After the Olympic and Paralympic Games, it will be turned into subsidized student dormitories, including communal kitchens, sorely needed in a city with six universities and squeezed for affordable housing.
With the Milan Cortina Games the most spread-out in history, Olympic officials also had to create space for athletes at five other venues.
A temporary village has been built to house 1,100 athletes and officials in Cortina, while hotels and alpine lodges have been adapted in Anterselva and Bormio, each housing 400 participants, and nearly 1,000 in Livigno. In Predazzo, more than 900 will be housed in a school for Italy’s financial police that has been renovated for the Olympics and Paralympics. It will be returned to the police when the competitions are over, complete with two new pavilions.
Athletes from the Netherlands walk in the Olympic Village ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
A man crosses a road near to USA team signs, at the Olympic Village ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian drone strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro hit a bus carrying mineworkers and killed 15 people, Ukrainian emergency services said Sunday, hours after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that the next round of peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations will take place on Wednesday and Thursday.
The strike injured a further seven people and sparked a fire that was subsequently put out, according to the emergency services.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said it owned the bus and accused Russia of carrying out “a large-scale terrorist attack on DTEK mines in the Dnipropetrovsk region,” whose capital is Dnipro.
“The epicenter of one of the attacks was a company bus transporting miners from the enterprise after a shift in the Dnipropetrovsk region,” the company said in a Telegram post.
The strike came days after U.S. President Donald Trump said the Kremlin had agreed to temporarily halt the targeting of the Ukrainian capital and other cities, as the region suffers under freezing temperatures that have brought widespread hardship to Ukrainians.
Hours earlier, Ukraine's emergency services reported that Russian attack drones injured six people at a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine, on Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, envoys from Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. had been expected to meet Sunday in Abu Dhabi to continue negotiations aimed at ending Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor. But on Sunday morning, Zelenskyy announced that they would take place next week instead.
“We have just had a report from our negotiating team. The dates for the next trilateral meetings have been set: Feb. 4 and 5 in Abu Dhabi. Ukraine is ready for substantive talks, and we are interested in an outcome that will bring us closer to a real and dignified end to the war,” Zelenskyy said in a Telegram post.
There was no immediate comment from U.S. or Russian officials.
On Saturday afternoon, top Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev said he had held a “constructive meeting with the U.S. peacemaking delegation” in Florida.
Officials have so far revealed few details of the talks in Abu Dhabi, which are part of a yearlong effort by the Trump administration to steer the sides toward a peace deal and end almost four years of all-out war.
While Ukrainian and Russian officials have agreed in principle with Washington’s calls for a compromise, Moscow and Kyiv differ deeply over what an agreement should look like.
A central issue is whether Russia should keep or withdraw from areas of Ukraine its forces have occupied, especially Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland called the Donbas, and whether it should get land there that it hasn’t yet captured.
Earlier on Sunday, Russian attack drones struck a maternity hospital in southern Ukraine, the Ukrainian emergency service reported.
In a Telegram post, it said the strike wounded three women in the hospital in the city of Zaporizhzhia, and also sparked a fire in the gynecology reception area that was later extinguished. Regional administration head Ivan Fedorov later said the number of injured had risen to six.
The Kremlin confirmed Friday it agreed to hold off striking Kyiv until Sunday, but refused to reveal any details, making it difficult for an independent assessment of whether the conciliatory step had indeed taken place.
In the past week, Russia has struck energy assets in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa and in Kharkiv in the northeast. It also hit the Kyiv region on Wednesday, killing two people and injuring four.
Overnight into Sunday, Russia launched 90 attack drones, with 14 striking nine locations, Ukraine’s air force said in a Telegram post. A woman and a man were killed in an overnight drone strike in Dnipro, according to local administration head Oleksandr Hanzha.
Russian shelling also hit central Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine, soon after 7 a.m., seriously wounding a 59-year-old woman, according to a Facebook post by the municipal military administration.
Russia's Defense Ministry on Sunday morning said its forces had used operational-tactical aviation, attack drones, missile forces and artillery to strike transport infrastructure used by Ukrainian forces.
In a separate post Sunday, it said that Russian air defenses shot down 21 Ukrainian drones flying over southwestern and western Russia. It did not mention any casualties or damage.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Veterans of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade of Ukraine's Armed Forces serve free hot meals in a residential neighborhood for people without power in their homes in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026.(AP Photo/Vladyslav Musiienko)
Putin's envoy Kirill Dmitriev, left, gestures speaking to U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy Jared Kushner prior to their meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Senate Palace of the Kremlin, in Moscow, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff, left, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov, second left, Putin's envoy Kirill Dmitriev, second right, and Trump's envoy Jared Kushner talk to each other prior to their meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Senate Palace of the Kremlin, in Moscow, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a joint press conference with Lithuania's President Gitanas Nauseda and Polish President Karol Nawrocki, at the Presidential palace in Vilnius, Lithuania, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)
