Russian missile and drone attack hits Kyiv

Russia launched a combined missile and drone attack on Kyiv in the early hours of Thursday, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens, according to the Guardian. Local emergency services reported 86 injured, with 70 hospitalised, as fires broke out across multiple sites and debris struck residential buildings and a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said the first to sixth floors of an apartment building collapsed after a direct hit, with rescuers pulling people from the rubble. The attack unfolded over several hours in waves, with loud explosions as Ukrainian air defences attempted to intercept drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. Thousands of residents took shelter in metro stations, a recurring routine in a capital that has faced regular combined strikes.

The timing also reflects the way both sides now use infrastructure pressure as a form of signalling. The Guardian reports the attack came amid fuel shortages in Russia linked to Ukrainian long-range drone strikes on oil refineries, with multiple Russian regions introducing petrol rationing. Russian authorities also declared a state of emergency in occupied Crimea, which Ukraine has said it will continue to target as a logistical hub for Russian forces.

Moscow framed the strikes as retaliation, with the Russian defence ministry saying weapons launched from air, land and sea were used and that military facilities and energy infrastructure were targeted, including outside Kyiv. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, called the retaliation claim “immoral” while on a working visit to Japan, writing that the war has an aggressor and a country defending itself.

In Russia, the governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region reported one person killed in a drone strike on industrial facilities there, underlining how the conflict’s reach is no longer geographically contained. What had once been a front line is increasingly a set of overlapping strike corridors, with civilians in major cities absorbing the consequences of decisions made far from the blast sites.

By Thursday morning, fires were still burning in Kyiv, and part of a block of flats remained sheared away from the impact.