After months of stagnant attritional combat along Ukraine’s hundreds-of-kilometer front line, the war between Russia and Ukraine has shifted dramatically to an intense battle of the skies, with both sides trading devastating waves of missile and drone attacks that have left civilian populations caught in the crossfire. This latest round of escalation has even spilled over into neighboring NATO territory, triggering an interception by a allied fighter jet.
Ukrainian officials confirmed Sunday that at least five civilians were killed and more than a dozen others wounded in a fresh wave of Russian long-range strikes that hit multiple regions across the country overnight. Among the hardest-hit targets was a popular outdoor book market in central Kyiv, where emergency services and firefighting teams rushed to the smoldering site to rescue trapped survivors and extinguish blasts sparked by the incoming missile. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, a repeated pattern in Moscow’s recent aerial campaign.
Local officials across Ukraine confirmed additional casualties in multiple attack sites: In Kryvyi Rih, a 44-year-old man previously reported missing was pulled dead from the rubble of a destroyed structure, with another civilian killed and 14 steel plant workers left injured. In Zaporizhzhia, two civilians in their 60s died when their residential home was leveled by a strike. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko added that at least six people, including one child, had been injured in strikes on the capital, where air-raid sirens have sounded four times since Saturday night. Zelenskyy noted that the strikes hit Kryvyi Rih and Kremenchuk with ballistic missiles, stating, “Wherever the Russians can reach with their ballistic missiles, they strike civilian infrastructure.” Across the past week alone, Zelenskyy said Russian forces have launched more than 1,550 attack drones, nearly 1,560 guided aerial bombs, and 62 missiles across 13 Ukrainian regions.
For its part, Russia claimed all of its overnight strikes targeted military-related infrastructure connected to Ukraine’s war effort. The Russian defense ministry said its attacks on Kyiv targeted a FirePoint facility producing parts for Ukraine’s Flamingo missiles and a drone component factory. It also confirmed strikes on the Kremenchuk oil refinery in the Poltava region, which it says supplies fuel to Ukrainian frontline forces, a Kryvyi Rih steelworks producing weapons components for the Ukrainian military, and a dry cargo vessel off the coast of Odesa that it claims was carrying military equipment.
The escalation is not one-sided: Overnight, Ukraine launched roughly 600 drones toward the Russian capital Moscow, in one of Kyiv’s largest drone attacks on the city in months. Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin confirmed that air defenses intercepted around two-thirds of the incoming drones, but three people were injured in the attack, and a large warehouse belonging to leading Russian online retailer Wildberries, located 25 kilometers outside central Moscow in Koledino, was directly hit. Amateur video footage from the site shows large flames billowing from the structure and a thick black plume of smoke rising visible for kilometers.
Wildberries, often described as Russia’s domestic equivalent to Amazon, has been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian drone strikes since July. At the start of the campaign against the retailer, Kyiv confirmed it was targeting the logistics hub because the facility is used to route military supplies to Russian frontline forces, with the goal of disrupting Russia’s military supply chains. Russian defense officials reported that overall, Russian air defenses intercepted and destroyed 822 Ukrainian drones launched across Russian territory in the latest exchanges.
In a development that underscores the risk of the war spilling beyond Ukraine’s borders, Romania’s defense ministry announced Sunday that a Spanish NATO F-18 fighter jet shot down an unauthorized drone that breached Romanian airspace near the country’s border with Ukraine and Moldova. The drone entered Romanian airspace from Moldovan territory, and was intercepted at 05:01 local time Sunday by the jet, which is deployed to NATO’s eastern flank air policing mission. Debris from the downed drone fell in an unpopulated area of Romania’s Galati region, close to the Ukrainian border, and no injuries or damage to civilian property were reported.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and currently maintains control of roughly 20 percent of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. After more than two years of war, ground advances by both sides along the thousand-kilometer front line have been minimal, turning the conflict into a war of attrition. In recent months, the fighting has increasingly shifted to aerial exchanges, with both side launching long-range missile and drone strikes to degrade the other’s military capacity and disrupt frontline supply lines.