A deadly Russian drone attack on a civilian shopping center in central Ukraine’s Kryvyi Rih has left at least six people dead and dozens more injured, local officials confirmed Friday, marking the latest escalation in Moscow’s months-long intensified aerial campaign across the war-torn country.
Oleksandr Vilkul, head of Kryvyi Rih’s regional military administration, announced that among the 91 people wounded in the afternoon strike were six children. As of Friday evening, search and rescue operations were still underway at the devastated site, with Vilkul warning that the final death toll could climb higher. Kryvyi Rih holds special political significance as the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and has endured repeated Russian strikes throughout the full-scale invasion that began in 2022. One of the deadliest previous attacks on the city came in April 2025, when 20 people — nine of them children — were killed.
In a social media statement Friday, Zelenskyy condemned the attack as a deliberate act of terrorism, noting it followed a so-called “double tap” tactic: an initial wave of drones hit the area first, followed by a second strike deployed specifically as first responders arrived to rescue wounded civilians.
The deadly attack on Kryvyi Rih came just 24 hours after a massive overnight Russian barrage of missiles and drones targeted Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, killing a minimum of 16 people across the region. In recent months, Russian forces have ramped up ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv, taking advantage of a critical gap in Ukraine’s air defense capabilities: a crippling shortage of U.S.-manufactured Patriot interceptors, the only weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal currently capable of intercepting Russia’s ballistic missiles.
Large-scale Russian civilian-targeted strikes have become a near-weekly occurrence this summer across Ukraine. A little over two weeks before the Kyiv and Kryvyi Rih attacks, a Russian assault on Kyiv and its surrounding suburbs killed 17 people; just two days prior to that, nine civilians died in strikes on the capital. Last week, United Nations data confirmed Kyiv as one of the hardest-hit regions in Ukraine in July, recording at least 54 civilian fatalities and 202 people injured from Russian aerial attacks.