Russia launched drones, missiles and guided aerial bombs across Ukraine early Sunday, killing five people in a major nighttime attack that Ukrainian officials said targeted civilian infrastructure.
Moscow fired 53 ballistic and cruise missiles and 496 drones, Ukraine’s air force said. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported that nine regions were targeted.
Four people, including a 15-year-old, died in a combined drone and missile strike on Lviv, according to regional officials and Ukraine’s emergency service.
It was the largest aerial assault on the historic western city and surrounding region since Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, according to Maksym Kozytskyi, head of the local military administration. Earlier in the war, Lviv was seen as a haven from the fighting and destruction farther east.
In a Telegram post, Kozytskyi said Russia launched about 140 Shahed drones and 23 ballistic missiles across the region. At least six more people were injured, according to a statement by Ukraine’s police force.
The strike left two districts of Lviv without power and disrupted public transportation for a few hours early Sunday, Mayor Andriy Sadovyi reported. He added that a business complex on Lviv’s outskirts caught fire following the strike, describing it as a civilian facility unlinked to Ukraine’s war effort.
One person was also injured in the Ivano-Frankivsk region south of Lviv, according to regional head Svitlana Onyshchuk.
In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, an aerial assault killed a civilian woman and wounded nine other people including a 16-year-old girl, regional head Ivan Fedorov reported. He said Russia attacked with drones and guided aerial bombs.
Fedorov said the strike destroyed residential buildings and left about 73,000 households in Zaporizhzhia and surrounding areas without power.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said the overnight strikes targeted Ukraine’s “military-industrial complex” and energy facilities that supply it.
Separately, six people including a child were injured in Sloviansk, a key city in the eastern Donetsk region that remains under Ukrainian control, after a Russian guided aerial bomb slammed into an apartment block, regional prosecutors said Sunday. They said Russian airstrikes on Saturday evening damaged over two dozen residential buildings in Sloviansk, as well as cars, shops and a cafe.
Russia blasts Ukraine’s power grid as winter approachesZelenskyy on Sunday reiterated his call for Kyiv’s Western partners to send additional air defenses to combat Russia’s “aerial terror.”
“Today, the Russians again targeted our infrastructure, everything that ensures people can live a normal life. We need more protection, a rapid implementation of all defense agreements, especially on air defense, to make this aerial terror pointless,” he said in a Telegram post.
Ukraine has for months conducted its own long-range strikes on Russia, many of which have targeted Moscow’s oil infrastructure and contributed to persistent fuel shortages.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces shot down 32 Ukrainian drones during the night, with at least 50 more downed during the day over southwestern Russia.
Drones damaged several homes, cars and a power line in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, according to local Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov. Separately, he reported that Ukrainian shelling gravely wounded the deputy head of a border village.
For its part, the Kremlin has ramped up attacks on Ukraine’s power grid ahead of winter, as in previous years since the full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Kyiv calls it an attempt to weaponize the weather by denying civilians heat, light and running water.
Serhii Koretskyi, CEO of Ukraine’s state-owned Naftogaz Group, said Sunday’s attack inflicted further large-scale damage on gas infrastructure that supplies civilians, just two days after what the company said was the largest Russian strike on its facilities since the all-out invasion.
Russia’s goal was to deprive Ukrainians of gas, heat, and electricity, Koretskyi was quoted as saying in a Naftogaz statement. The company did not elaborate on the damage from the latest strike.
In his nightly address to Ukrainians on Sunday, Zelenskyy charged that Moscow is “openly trying to destroy our civilian infrastructure now, before winter — our gas infrastructure, electricity generation and transmission.”
“Unfortunately, there’s been no dignified, powerful global response to everything that’s happening, to the ever-increasing scale and brazenness of the strikes, he said, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “simply laughing at the West’s silence and lack of a strong response.”
Moscow has also stepped up airstrikes on Ukraine’s railway network, which is essential for military transport, hitting it almost daily in the past two months. Russian drones on Saturday struck a railway station in the northern city of Shostka, killing one and wounding dozens.
Putin warns US against arming KyivOn Thursday, Putin doubled down on warnings that any supplies of long-range weapons by the U.S. to Ukraine would badly hurt bilateral ties.
The potential supply of U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kyiv will signal a “qualitatively new stage of escalation, including in relations between Russia and the U.S.,” Putin said at a forum of international foreign policy experts in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Putin’s remarks followed an apparent dramatic shift in Washington’s Ukraine policy, after U.S. President Donald Trump said late last month that he believed Ukraine could win back all territory lost to Russia.
Trump previously repeatedly called on Kyiv to make concessions to end the war, and ended Putin’s diplomatic isolation in the West by hosting him at a summit in Alaska on Aug. 15.
