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KYIV, Ukraine — Russia launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles against Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities overnight, killing at least 18 civilians and wounding more than 100 others, authorities said Tuesday.
The damage trapped some people under the rubble of apartment buildings. Emergency crews digging through the wreckage pulled out the body of a 3-year-old child and the bodies of a mother and her 8-year-old son in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, officials said.
The attack stretched from night into day, and the boom of explosions reverberated across cities. Officials said that 12 people were killed in Dnipro and six in Kyiv.
Kyiv residents had been on edge for days after Russia warned that a massive aerial attack was coming and warned foreign diplomats to leave the Ukrainian capital. None appeared to heed the call.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed for more U.S. and European support, describing the massive overnight attack as “an explicit statement by Russia: If Ukraine is not protected from ballistic missiles and other missile strikes, those strikes will continue.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has stepped up Moscow’s aerial campaign against Ukraine, with Russian forces recently launching a powerful hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missile for only the third time in the four-year war.
The Russian strategy seeks to take advantage of Ukraine’s shortage of U.S.-made Patriot air defense missiles, with international stocks depleted by the Iran war. That has left civilians especially vulnerable to the Russian ballistic missile barrages, even as air defenses stop most of the attack drones.
Russia unleashed 73 missiles and 656 drones across Ukraine, according to the country’s air force, with the main targets including Kyiv, the central city of Dnipro, and the eastern cities of Poltava, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Ukrainian air defense forces destroyed or suppressed 40 missiles and 602 drones.
Putin seeks to change the narrative of the war
Mr. Putin is keen to generate some positive news from the conflict that began with Russia’s February 2022 invasion of its neighbor and hasn’t gone according to plan.
Western officials and analysts say Ukrainian drones are pinning down Russian troops on the front line, choking Russian supply lines in occupied regions of Ukraine and disrupting oil facilities deep inside Russia that provide vital revenue for Moscow. That has made the war, which Moscow refers to as a “special military operation,” more visible to Russians and increased pressure on Mr. Putin.
U.S.-led peace efforts have fizzled out as the sides made no progress on key differences and after the Gulf and Middle East grabbed Washington’s attention. Mr. Zelenskyy accepted an unconditional ceasefire demanded by U.S. President Trump, but Mr. Putin refused.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that the military launched a “massive” strike with long-range precision weapons on military-industrial facilities in the Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Khmelnytsk and Sumy regions.
Mr. Putin signaled that Russia won’t let up its attacks. He said Tuesday that Ukraine’s May 22 drone attack on a college dormitory in Starobilsk in the Russia-controlled Luhansk region of Ukraine that killed 21 had given the war “a whole new dimension.”
Ukraine said it hit a Russian drone pilot training center in Starobilsk.
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