One person was killed yesterday and 26 others injured after a night of intensive Russian strikes on almost every district in Kyiv, officials said.
A pall of acrid smoke hung over the Ukrainian capital yesterday, following hours of nightfall punctuated by the staccato of air defence guns, buzz of drones and large explosions. Ukraine said Russia fired a record 539 drones and 11 missiles, the BBC reported.
The strikes came hours after a call between US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, after which Trump said he was “disappointed” that Putin was not ready to end the war against Ukraine.
Moscow said the war would continue for as long as it is necessary to reach its objectives.
Russia’s overnight air strikes broke another record, Ukraine’s air force said, with 72 of the 539 drones penetrating air defences – up from a previous record of 537 launched last Saturday night.
Air raid alerts sounded for more than eight hours as several waves of attacks struck Kyiv, the “main target of the strikes”, the air force said on the messaging app Telegram.
Footage shared on social media by Ukraine’s state emergency service showed firefighters battling to extinguish fires in Kyiv after Russia’s overnight attack.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the strikes as one of the most “demonstratively significant and cynical” attacks of the war, describing a “harsh, sleepless night”.
Noting that it came directly after Putin’s call with Trump, Zelensky added in a post on Telegram: “Russia once again demonstrates that it does not intend to end the war.”
He called on international allies – particularly the US – to increase pressure on Moscow and impose greater sanctions.
Later yesterday, Zelensky and Trump held a phone call regarding the supply of US weapons, which the Ukrainian leader said was a “very important and fruitful conversation”. It came after Washington decided to halt some shipments of critical weapons to Ukraine, including those used for air defences.
“We spoke about opportunities in air defence and agreed that we will work together to strengthen protection of our skies,” Zelensky said on X.
Kyiv has warned that the move to pause some shipments would impede its ability to defend Ukraine against escalating airstrikes and Russian advances on the frontlines.
According to Ukrainian authorities, the overnight strikes damaged railway infrastructure, while schools, buildings and cars were set ablaze across Kyiv.
Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski, said the Polish consulate had also been damaged.
The Russian strikes also hit the regions of Sumy, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Chernihiv. Rescuers also found a dead body while going through the rubble in the Svyatoshynsky district, the head of the Kyiv city military administration said.
Russia’s defence ministry said the “massive strike” had been launched in response to the “terrorist acts of the Kyiv regime”.
The acting governor of Russia’s southern Rostov region said a woman was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on a village not far from the border on Friday night.
Map showing five cities in regions in Ukraine hit by Russian air strikes on Thursday night – Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Kryvyi Rih . It also shows Russia’s current military control and advances in Ukraine mostly in the east and south of the country.
Yesterday’s attacks were the latest in a string of major Russian air strikes on Ukraine that have intensified in recent weeks as ceasefire talks have largely stalled.
War in Ukraine has been raging for more than three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Following his conversation with Putin on Thursday, Trump said”no progress” to end the fighting had been made.
“I’m very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin, because I don’t think he’s there, and I’m very disappointed,” Trump said.
“I’m just saying I don’t think he’s looking to stop, and that’s too bad.”
The Kremlin reiterated that it would continue to seek to remove “the root causes of the war in Ukraine”. Putin has sought to return Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence and said last week that “the whole of Ukraine is ours”.
Responding to Trump’s comments yesterday, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the BBC that as long as it was not possible to secure Russia’s aims through political-diplomatic means, “we are continuing our Special Military Operation” – Russia’s preferred name for the invasion.
Previously, Trump has said that the US is “giving weapons” to Ukraine, and hasn’t completely paused the flow of munitions. He blamed former President Joe Biden for “emptying out our whole country giving them weapons, and we have to make sure that we have enough for ourselves”.
Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte, yesterday, said while he understands Washington’s needs to maintain its own weapon stockpiles, he hopes “for a level of flexibility” to make sure Ukraine also has what it needs.
Meanwhile, a German government spokesperson said they were currently in talks with the US to buy Patriot air defence systems to give to Ukraine.