At least three people were killed Sunday morning and 18 others injured in the largest Russian airstrike on Ukrainian territory since the start of the war — an assault that, for the first time, damaged Ukraine’s central government building in Kyiv. A fire broke out in the building, and among the dead was a baby, whose body was pulled from the rubble.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said the roof and upper floors of the government building in Kyiv were hit and that rescue forces were called in to extinguish the flames. Witnesses told Reuters they saw thick smoke rising above the Pecherskyi historic district of the capital shortly after sunrise.
The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia launched 805 drones and 13 missiles overnight and into the morning. Ukrainian air defenses downed 751 drones and four missiles. Still, officials said it was the largest number of drones Russia has deployed in a single night since its February 2022 invasion.
Timur Tkachchenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said a four-story apartment building was hit in the Darnytskyi district east of the Dnipro River, where rescuers recovered the bodies of a baby and a woman. Earlier, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported that an elderly woman was killed in a shelter in the same district and that a pregnant woman was wounded. In total, 17 other people were injured.
Fires were reported across Kyiv. In the Sviatoshynskyi district in the west, parts of a nine-story residential building were destroyed. Debris from a drone sparked a blaze in a 16-story apartment block and damaged two other nine-story buildings. Tkachchenko accused Russia of “deliberately and knowingly targeting civilian sites,” a claim Moscow continues to deny.
“This morning I call on the world to respond to Russia’s attacks and send Ukraine more weapons,” Svyrydenko said. “We will rebuild the buildings, but the lives lost cannot be returned. The enemy is terrorizing and killing our people across the country every day.”
The government building strike followed a late-August attack that damaged the European Union delegation’s offices and the British consulate in Kyiv, killing more than 25 people but sparing the diplomatic missions themselves. Until Sunday, government buildings in Kyiv had largely been spared in three and a half years of Russian bombardment, making the attack unprecedented.
Kyiv was not the only target overnight. Dozens of explosions shook the central city of Kremenchuk, cutting power in several areas and damaging a bridge across the Dnipro River. In Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown, explosions were reported but no casualties. In Odesa, in southern Ukraine, residential buildings and civilian infrastructure were hit, with fires breaking out in several apartment blocks.
The massive assault came nearly a month after U.S. President Donald Trump held a summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to end the war. But cease-fire talks appear to have stalled. After that summit, Trump froze plans to impose heavy tariffs on buyers of Russian oil and gas — measures aimed at curbing Moscow’s revenues — and now the world is watching to see if he will revive the plan. Last week, Trump warned of “serious consequences” if no progress is made and said Thursday he would soon speak again with Putin.
Meanwhile, Ukraine said Sunday that it struck the Druzhba oil pipeline in Russia’s Bryansk region, causing significant damage. The pipeline supplies oil to Hungary and Slovakia — two of Putin’s closest allies in the European Union, and among the few still purchasing Russian energy despite EU sanctions. Deliveries have already been disrupted several times in recent weeks by Ukrainian attacks.