A major Russian attack kills 17 in Kyiv as Ukraine keeps striking Moscow's oil sector
More than 70 missiles fired at Ukraine capital as Russia faces fuel shortages after strikes against its oil refineries At least 21 people were killed and dozens injured overnight in Kyiv, local authorities said, in what .
VERDICT — CONFIRMED
Russia struck Kyiv with one of the heaviest bombardments of the war in the early hours of Thursday, an hours-long attack using nearly 500 drones and more than 70 missiles that local authorities said killed at least 21 people and injured dozens — a toll first reported at 17 — as Ukraine pressed its own campaign against Russia's oil sector, per The Globe and Mail and the wire summary of record.
Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv's mayor, called it the worst Russian attack on the capital in more than four years of air assault on Ukraine, per the summary. Loud explosions shook the city for several hours as waves of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles came in and Ukrainian air defence attempted to shoot them down. The Hindu and ABC Australia also carried the strike and the moving death toll.
Ukraine's long-range campaign continued in parallel. The Ufa oil refinery, more than 1,000 km from Ukraine, was struck for the second time in a week, per The Globe and Mail, and a missile-component plant was hit in the Penza region, roughly 500 km from Ukraine, where two industrial plants were struck and two people injured. Russia's defence ministry claimed 179 Ukrainian drones were intercepted across 16 Russian regions, Crimea and the Azov and Black Seas.
Elsewhere in Ukraine on Wednesday, at least five civilians were killed and 35 injured, per The Globe and Mail: two killed and six injured in the Kherson region when a drone struck a bus; two killed in Kharkiv, including a 15-year-old, with 26 wounded, among them a one-year-old; and a 43-year-old woman killed in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where three people were injured, including a pregnant woman.
Background
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, settled long ago into a grinding pattern in which massed drone-and-missile barrages against Ukrainian cities run alongside a largely static front. Kyiv, ringed by the country's densest air defences, has absorbed repeated waves of attack, and Mr Klitschko — mayor since 2014 — has become the customary voice of the capital's casualty counts. Ukraine's counter-campaign of long-range drone strikes against refineries and military plants deep inside Russia is its principal means of imposing costs on Moscow's war economy, and Russian fuel shortages following refinery strikes have been reported as that campaign has intensified.
What comes next
Casualty figures from the Kyiv strike are provisional and may rise as rescue operations continue, as the movement from 17 to at least 21 dead already shows. Watch for Ukraine's requests for additional air-defence support from Western partners — Swedish Defence Minister Paul Jonsson was among the officials quoted in The Globe and Mail's coverage — and for further Ukrainian strikes on Russian refining capacity, which Kyiv has shown no sign of pausing.
