Ukraine's Air Force has now published its official count for the overnight attack, and it shows the full shape of the strike that answered the Abu Dhabi talks. Beginning at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Russia launched Iskander-M, KN-23 and S-400 ballistic missiles and Zircon anti-ship missiles from its Bryansk, Voronezh and Kursk regions, alongside 123 drones of every type — Shahed strike drones, 73 of them jet-powered, plus Gerbera, Banderol/Dan-T and Parodiya decoys, sent from launch sites in Russia and from occupied Donetsk region and Crimea. By 8 a.m., Ukrainian air defences had shot down or suppressed 94 air targets — five Banderol/Dan-T drones and 89 Shahed-type and other drones — while Russian weapons struck 17 locations and debris fell at 18 more. The Air Force gave no total for the missiles launched and claimed no missile interceptions.
In Kyiv, the strike has turned deadly. During the morning drone wave, a drone hit a nine-story apartment building in the Solomianskyi district, setting flats from the third to the sixth floor on fire and partially destroying part of the fifth floor. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a woman was killed and five people were injured; the Kyiv City Military Administration said the woman was 44 and that medics treated all of the injured at the scene. The toll replaces the earliest reports from the scene, which had put the injured at one.
The strike also reached western Ukraine's power grid. In Rivne region, Russian attacks hit energy facilities and homes, cutting electricity to the town of Kostopil and to settlements across the Rivnenskyi and Sarnenskyi districts, oblast head Oleksandr Koval said; critical infrastructure was switched to generators, and officials reported no deaths or injuries there. BBC Ukrainian put the number of settlements left without power at more than 160.
Russia's Defence Ministry, for its part, claimed its forces had hit a rocket factory in Kyiv — an enterprise of the rocket and space industry producing Hornet-type drones — along with a drone assembly workshop and a missile fuel factory in the wider Kyiv region and electricity substations in Zhytomyr region. Ukraine has confirmed damage to energy and civilian infrastructure but has not confirmed the ministry's account of the military targets. President Zelenskyy, in Dublin for the next round of diplomacy, has made no statement on the strike itself; his public words on Thursday stayed on the talks — that there is "hope", and that Ukraine will not trade territory for a deal — while the prisoner exchange agreed in Abu Dhabi waits to be carried out.
— Previously posted on November 12, 2026 —
Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv in the early hours of Thursday, just hours after the U.S.-brokered peace talks in Abu Dhabi ended — the war answering the negotiating table before the ink on its one agreement was a day old. A missile threat was declared over the Ukrainian capital at about 1 a.m. local time, sending residents to shelters, and explosions were heard across the city as air defences engaged, a Reuters witness in Kyiv reported. The alert over the capital lasted a little over an hour before the all-clear sounded. The Kyiv Independent, whose reporters were in the city through the attack, reported that Russia attacked the capital with ballistic missiles.
What is not yet known matters as much as what is. Ukraine's air force had not published its overnight count by early Thursday — no confirmed number of missiles fired or intercepted, no confirmed list of targets, and no confirmed casualty figures for this strike — and Russia's defence ministry had issued no statement on it. Those facts will be reported here as officials confirm them. One warning for readers seeing bigger numbers elsewhere: the widely reported barrage of 36 ballistic missiles and 172 drones against Kyiv was a different attack, on the night of November 6–7, before the talks — not this one.
The talks the missiles followed were the first face-to-face trilateral meeting between Russian, Ukrainian and American negotiators since February. Two days of U.S.-brokered sessions in Abu Dhabi wrapped up on Wednesday after a short second-day meeting of under two hours. The one concrete result was humanitarian: Russia and Ukraine agreed to carry out a large-scale exchange of prisoners of war, with the final numbers to be confirmed on Thursday. On the war's hardest questions there was no movement — Russia's chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, ruled out any exchange of territory, saying no land-for-peace trade is on the table, and no ceasefire was agreed.
Nor did the fighting pause while the negotiators sat. During the talks themselves, Russia struck six major electricity facilities in four Ukrainian regions overnight, Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskiy reported, and a drone strike left the south-central city of Kryviy Rih partially without electricity and heating. The night before the talks opened, Russia had launched a ballistic missile and 162 drones at Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had accused Moscow in advance of "preparing for the trilateral talks by launching ballistic missiles at Ukraine's critical infrastructure" — and Thursday's strike means the pattern held on the far side of the table as well.
The missiles Kyiv fears most are the ballistic kind, and the November 6–7 attack showed why: of 36 ballistic missiles fired at the capital region that night, Ukraine intercepted only four, a result Zelenskyy blamed on a shortage of interceptors for the American-made Patriot systems — the only defences Ukraine has that can reliably stop ballistic weapons. That shortage is a live question for Washington as much as for Kyiv, and every new ballistic strike on the capital renews it.
For families in Kyiv, Thursday began the way too many nights now end: woken after 1 a.m., children carried to corridors and metro stations, in a city whose power grid has been battered for weeks with temperatures near freezing. For Americans, the strike is the first test of the process their negotiators just ran — a prisoner exchange that brings soldiers home to their families is real progress worth having, and Washington's envoys carry the talks onward this week; but a capital under ballistic fire hours after the handshakes is the measure of how far the table still is from stopping the war.
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