标签： Europe

A devastating large-scale assault combining missile and drone attacks launched by Russia against Ukraine’s capital city Kyiv has left one civilian dead and 21 other people wounded, according to local officials. Blasts echoed across every district of the city early Sunday, leaving widespread destruction that damaged civilian infrastructure including private residential buildings and a local school.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced via the messaging platform Telegram that a 15-year-old boy was counted among the injured, with 13 patients transferred to local medical facilities. Three of those hospitalized remain in critical condition as of Sunday morning. The overnight assault, which targeted more than 40 separate locations across Kyiv, sent debris crashing into populated areas that ignited destructive blazes at apartment blocks, storage warehouses, a neighborhood supermarket and a large shopping center, Klitschko added.

The attack comes directly after Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly promised retaliation for what he called a deadly Ukrainian strike on a student dormitory in the occupied eastern Ukrainian town of Starobilsk last Friday, an incident that Russia claims killed 18 people. Ukraine’s General Staff has confirmed it conducted a military strike in the Starobilsk area overnight Friday, but explicitly states the target was a deployed Russian military unit, not civilian student housing.

Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, confirmed in an early post-strike Telegram update that the capital had sustained a massive ballistic missile attack, warning that additional Russian launches could still be imminent. The single confirmed fatality occurred when a nine-story residential building in Kyiv’s central Shevchenko district was directly hit, sparking an uncontrolled blaze that broke out across the building’s top floors. In the same district, a strike near a school’s air raid shelter blocked the entrance with fallen rubble, trapping multiple people inside the facility.

Emergency response teams have been deployed across the capital to respond to dozens of damaged sites, working to extinguish ongoing fires, clear blocked routes and debris, and provide emergency medical care to those wounded. “Cleanup operations to remediate the aftermath of the shelling are still underway,” Tkachenko said, noting that official details on temporary aid distribution centers would be released shortly. The attack did not come as a complete surprise: one day prior, on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that intelligence shared from Ukrainian, European and U.S. sources indicated Russia was preparing to launch a major combined strike across Ukrainian territory, with Kyiv as a primary target.

In his warning, Zelenskyy specifically highlighted that Russia could potentially deploy the new Oreshnik missile in the assault, a weapon that is reported to travel at over 10 times the speed of sound and is currently believed to be impossible for existing Ukrainian air defense systems to intercept.

Overnight Sunday, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv came under a sustained, large-scale Russian attack combining cruise missiles and attack drones, triggering widespread panic and damaging multiple civilian and state sites across the city center, local Ukrainian officials confirmed on the record. Based on preliminary casualty counts released by municipal authorities, at least 10 people were wounded in the strikes, which sent plumes of smoke rising over multiple districts and kept the entire city on high alert through the pre-dawn hours.

Reporters with the Associated Press, who were on the ground in Kyiv, documented multiple powerful detonations concentrated near central Kyiv, in close proximity to key government administrative buildings. As of sunrise on Sunday, the assault was still ongoing, with Ukrainian air defense officials warning that additional incoming projectiles were expected to reach the capital imminently.

Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, announced via a Telegram public post that visible damage to infrastructure had been confirmed across at least nine of the capital’s districts, with multiple residential apartment buildings among the impacted sites. Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko added that a school building in the city’s central Shevchenko district suffered structural damage during the attack, at a time when local civilians were sheltering inside the facility to avoid incoming strikes. Beyond public and residential sites, local officials also confirmed that multiple supermarkets and logistics warehouses scattered across Kyiv suffered damage from shrapnel, blast waves, and direct hits.

Mykola Kalashnyk, governor of Kyiv Oblast, added that residential and civilian communities across the wider regional area outside the capital city limits also recorded damage from the overnight assault.

The attack comes just after Ukrainian leadership issued explicit warnings about a potential new Russian strike using the advanced hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missile. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that he based the warning on intelligence shared by the United States and other Western allied partners, and Ukraine’s Air Force followed the president’s statement with an official advisory of a possible Oreshnik launch. As of Sunday morning, it remains unconfirmed whether the Oreshnik system was actually deployed in the overnight attack on Kyiv.

Russia first deployed the multiple-warhead Oreshnik missile against Ukrainian infrastructure in the city of Dnipro in November 2024, with a second strike using the weapon carried out in Ukraine’s western Lviv region this past January. Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly emphasized the capabilities of the new system, whose name translates to “hazelnut tree” in Russian. He claims the missile travels at Mach 10—10 times the speed of sound— and can penetrate reinforced underground bunkers three, four, or more levels below the surface. Putin has described the weapon as moving like a meteorite, noting that it is impervious to all existing Western and Ukrainian missile defense systems. He added that even a small number of Oreshnik missiles armed with conventional warheads can generate destructive power on par with a nuclear strike, according to his public comments on the weapons system.

A devastating incident that reduced a five-story college building in Starobilsk to mounds of rubble has plunged the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict into a new phase of escalating tensions, triggering mutual accusations between Moscow and Kyiv, an urgent emergency gathering of the UN Security Council, and open threats of harsh retaliation from the Kremlin.

Starobilsk sits within the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, an area that has been under Russian military occupation since Moscow launched its full-scale incursion in 2022, and that Russia controversially claims to have formally annexed. Early Friday, the structure that collapsed housed the Starobilsk Professional College, a branch of Luhansk Pedagogical University, leaving a scene of widespread destruction visible in footage broadcast on Russian state television. Rescue crews could be seen working methodically through piles of concrete and twisted metal to pull survivors and victims from the wreckage.

Russian authorities have publicly blamed Ukraine for the carnage, framing the event as a deliberate drone strike targeting the college’s student dormitory. As of the latest official updates from Moscow, the death toll has climbed to 21, with 42 additional people sustaining injuries of varying severity. Russian state media has shared firsthand accounts from survivors, including 21-year-old Olga Kovaleva, who was trapped under fallen debris for hours before being pulled out alive and transported to a local hospital for treatment. The outlet also published a full list of the deceased students, alongside their dates of birth, to confirm the identities of those killed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has labeled the incident a “terrorist strike”, rejecting any suggestion that the building was hit accidentally by Russian air defense or electronic warfare systems. “There had been no military facilities, intelligence service facilities or related services in the vicinity,” Putin stated, arguing this eliminates any plausible defense of unintended collateral damage from Russian operations. He has since formally ordered Russia’s Ministry of Defence to draft a comprehensive set of retaliatory measures in response to what Moscow calls an unacceptable attack on civilian targets.

Kyiv has pushed back entirely against Russia’s narrative. In an official statement released by the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, the military confirmed it did conduct a targeted strike near Starobilsk overnight between May 21 and 22, but clarified that the attack hit a Russian military unit stationed in the area, not a civilian college dormitory. To date, Ukraine has not acknowledged any civilian casualties from the strike.

Within hours of the incident, Russia submitted an official request to the United Nations for an emergency meeting of the Security Council to address the attack. At the session, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenyza presented graphic photos of the destroyed college to council members, arguing that the strike “constitutes a war crime” under the standards of international humanitarian law.

Not all council members backed Russia’s framing of the event, however. Denmark’s representative to the UN pushed back against Russia’s call for condemnation, pointing to the widespread destruction and civilian casualties that Russia’s own military campaign has inflicted across Ukraine since 2022. “If we were to apply the same logic behind Russia’s call for today’s meeting, we would need twice-daily emergency Security Council meetings — including on the weekends — to only scratch the surface of the terror, death and destruction inflicted across Ukraine by Russia,” the Danish representative noted.

The incident has also emboldened hawkish, pro-Kremlin voices to push for aggressive retaliation that extends beyond Ukrainian territory. Sergey Karaganov, honorary chairman of the presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, told Russian state outlet Vesti that Moscow should not limit its response to targets inside Ukraine. “We need to start punishing Europe for things like this, including with strikes,” Karaganov said. “Symbolic [strikes] to start with. Then, perhaps, less symbolic ones.”

By late Saturday, Russian emergency officials confirmed that search and rescue operations at the site had been fully completed, bringing an official end to efforts to recover additional victims or survivors from the rubble.