At least 17 people have been killed, and dozens more were wounded in a “massive” Russian attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and surrounding region on Thursday.
At least 17 people have been killed, and dozens more were wounded in a “massive” Russian attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and surrounding region on Thursday. The Ukrainian authorities noted that the overnight attack also managed to bleed into Moldova and Romania, with the latter saying an explosive-laden naval drone believed to have been launched by Russia targeted one of its offshore natural gas projects, CNN reported.
In the Ukrainian capital, the Russian strikes damaged a hospital, a school, a preschool, residential buildings and several warehouses across the city. The reporters on the ground heard several explosions and saw smoke over the city, as an air raid alert stretched on for hours. The attack on the capital of the war-torn nation continued during the day as three separate air raid alarms sounded in the capital on Thursday.
The Ukrainian authorities maintained that the country has been relatively successful at intercepting the massive numbers of drones that Russia uses in its large-scale attacks. However, in recent weeks, Moscow has been reportedly exploiting Kyiv’s near-zero stocks of patriot interceptor missiles, which are needed to defend against faster-moving ballistic missiles.
It is pertinent to note that Ukraine has only 10 per cent of the interceptor missiles, and it is urgently seeking help from the United States and other allies, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN in an interview earlier this month. “This year we have two and a half times fewer interceptors than we had in 2025,” Zelenskyy said in that interview. “Russia has two times more ballistic missiles per month than it had before.”
More from WorldRussia is striking Ukraine’s weakness
Amid the latest strikes, Romanian Foreign Minister Oana Toiu said European allies are “analysing” how they can support Ukraine’s air defence, but acknowledged that they’re not doing enough collectively. “And this is very obvious, not just by the increase in the attacks of Russian drones, but also by the weaker air defence that is currently in place,” she told CNN.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram that it had launched a “massive strike using high-precision weapons” against military facilities, a transport and logistics centre, and warehouses in the city of Kyiv and the broader region.
Zelenskyy, on the other hand, said that “the Russians prepared for a long time and combined various types of projectiles, cruise missiles, and drones to inflict as much damage as possible on civilian infrastructure.”
According to CNN, rescue workers, operating in the capital, had pulled two people from the rubble and were continuing to deal with the aftermath of the assault, hampered by the ongoing attacks. More than a dozen locations across the city were impacted, emergency services said.
The damage from the strikes
Windows were shattered at a children’s hospital in the Solomianskyi district, said Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy noted that outside Kyiv, Russia also attacked gas infrastructure in the Chernihiv region and a border crossing with Moldova in the Odesa region.
Drone attacks were also reported in the regions of Zhytomyr, Kherson, Kharkiv and Donetsk. In total, in the last 24 hours, the death toll in Ukraine has reached 25 people, with a further 132 injured throughout the country, according to reports from regional military administrations.
Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, also said on Thursday that her country’s airspace was once again violated as “a drone came down on Moldovan territory. Russia must face far greater pressure to stop this.” Romania’s defence ministry, on the other hand, said that the Russian drone had crashed into its territory, landing in an uninhabited area in the county of Tulcea, near the Ukrainian border, Reuters reported.
Amid the chaos, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the naval drone an example of “hybrid warfare” and said that “an escalating campaign of threats is underway, unsettling our citizens and seeking to divide our Union.”