Russia fired around 70 missiles, many of them ballistic, along with Shahed drones in one of the biggest attacks of the war. They hit Kyiv and 12 regions overnight into Wednesday, and one of the key targets was Ukraine's energy sector. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram: "The Russians wanted to strike painfully and demonstratively."
The toll climbed through the day. Officials first reported at least 19 dead; later counts put it around 24, including four children, with about 60 wounded. The worst single hit was in Pryluky, in the northern Chernihiv region, where a missile destroyed an ordinary five-storey apartment building. Thirteen people died there, including four children, and about 50 were injured. Two people were killed in Kyiv, two in the Poltava region around Kremenchuk, and two in Oleksandriia.
In Kyiv, explosions echoed across the center of the capital at about 3 a.m. local time. A missile hit a nonresidential building in the Podilskyi district and triggered a fire. In the Darnytskyi district, another strike set a garage complex ablaze. Ukrainian officials said flats, industrial plants, and infrastructure were also damaged across the country, and rescue operations were still running.
Ukraine saw it coming. Zelenskyy warned the day before that intelligence services had concluded Russia was building up for a "massive" strike. It came anyway, and it coincided with Russian President Vladimir Putin's 74th birthday. Zelenskyy called the destroyed Pryluky building, in so many words, a birthday gift to Putin.
The attack showed why Ukraine keeps begging for air defence. Russian ballistic missiles and the new jet-powered drones are the hardest things to stop, and without ammunition for its U.S.-made Patriot systems, Ukraine cannot stop the ballistics. It is racing to build a new generation of interceptors fast enough to catch Moscow's high-flying drones. "Russian ballistic missiles remain the greatest challenge," Zelenskyy said. "And air defence packages for us right now are a vital necessity."
Russia's defence ministry said the overnight operation was a massive strike on industrial facilities involved in the production and storage of missiles and drones across Ukraine. It also said port and ship repair facilities in the southern Odesa region were hit, along with ships carrying cargo for the Ukrainian military.
Ukraine hit back the same day. Zelenskyy said that over the past 24 hours Ukrainian forces struck four targets that help Russia finance and wage the war: two oil facilities and a training ground in the Perm, Samara, and Astrakhan regions, plus a response in the Black Sea. Long-range drones and missiles against Russian oil refineries and storage depots have become Ukraine's answer to the bombardments.
More than four and a half years after Moscow's all-out invasion, the armies remain largely deadlocked on the ground. So the war keeps being fought in the sky, one overnight barrage at a time.