Rescue teams in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv are working tirelessly at dawn on Monday to extract trapped survivors from the rubble of bombed residential buildings after the second major Russian missile assault on the city in just one week. Monday’s attack claimed the lives of at least nine people and left 46 others wounded, including at least five children, according to Kyiv’s top military administrator Timur Tkachenko.
The coordinated missile barrage comes just 24 hours before the much-anticipated NATO summit scheduled to open in Turkey, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is set to hold high-stakes bilateral talks with U.S. President Donald Trump. In a prescient warning issued just hours before Monday’s strikes, Zelenskyy cautioned that Russian forces were planning a follow-up massive attack on Kyiv, just days after an earlier assault on Thursday killed 30 people across the capital.
Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko confirmed that Russian ballistic missiles impacted multiple locations across the city, sparking destructive blazes in several multi-story residential apartment complexes. Beyond civilian housing, the strikes also left warehouses and a local garage workshop heavily damaged. Visual evidence from the capital shows smoldering wreckage scattered across affected neighborhoods, with charred civilian vehicles abandoned along city streets. Footage captured on Monday morning shows emergency response crews systematically searching through collapsed building rubble for any remaining trapped survivors.
Thursday’s initial wave of Russian attacks, which included a combination of drones and missiles, forced tens of thousands of Kyiv residents to flee to underground metro stations for shelter as air raid sirens wailed across the city through the early hours of Friday. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly condemned Russia for intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure in these attacks, a charge Russia has denied. Moscow maintains that all of its strikes are aimed exclusively at military and energy-related targets, framing the recent assaults as retaliation for what it says are recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian power stations and energy infrastructure inside Russian territory.
Cross-border strikes targeting energy infrastructure continued over the weekend: overnight, power services in Sevastopol, a port city located on Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula, reported temporary full power outages across the city.
In the lead-up to the NATO summit, Zelenskyy has stepped up pressure on Western allies to speed up deliveries of long-range missiles that Ukraine can use to counter Russian offensive operations. In a post on the social platform X, Zelenskyy emphasized the human cost of delayed military support, writing: “Any delay with missiles for our air defense… means the loss of lives, and it encourages Russia to continue the war.” The Ukrainian leader has also made a formal request to the United States to grant manufacturing licenses that would allow Ukraine to produce its own Patriot air defense missiles domestically.