A wave of coordinated Russian missile and drone assaults across Ukraine early Thursday has left seven people dead, among them two young children, and left a trail of damaged civilian and non-residential infrastructure across the country, local Ukrainian officials have confirmed. The attack unfolded just hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly warned that Russia had spent weeks preparing a massive offensive against Ukrainian civilian targets, urging all citizens to take air raid warnings seriously and seek shelter immediately when alerts are issued.
The deadliest strike of the night hit a private residential home in a small village near Kryvyi Rih, a major central Ukrainian city. A local regional official confirmed that six people, including two girls aged 5 and 12, were killed in the impact. Another eight people, two of them children, were wounded in the attack, with officials adding that casualty numbers could still climb as emergency teams work to clear rubble from the destroyed property.
In Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, residents spent the overnight hours sheltering deep inside the city’s metro system, setting up temporary camps with tents and folding chairs to wait out the barrage of attacks. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko confirmed via his Telegram channel that one person was killed in the capital, and three separate non-residential buildings caught fire after being hit. No further details on the buildings’ purposes have been released as of Thursday morning.
Explosions were also reported in Lviv, a major city in western Ukraine far from the front lines of the ongoing conflict. Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi confirmed that multiple residential buildings suffered significant damage in the strikes, though no casualty figures for the city have been released publicly. BBC Ukraine reports that strikes were also carried out against targets in several other Ukrainian cities, with Russian missiles reaching as far as the western edge of the country, far from the primary conflict zone in eastern and southern Ukraine.
In response to the cross-border strikes, Poland announced it had mobilized its military aircraft as a defensive precautionary measure. The Polish armed forces confirmed the deployment in a post on the social platform X, noting that the move was intended to protect Polish airspace amid the large-scale offensive on neighboring Ukraine.
The assault comes just days after Zelensky traveled to Washington DC to hold a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, where he formally requested that the U.S. grant Ukraine a license to domestically produce Patriot air defense interceptor missiles. Zelensky has repeatedly stressed in recent statements that expanding Ukraine’s ballistic missile defense capacity is the single most critical step to protect Ukrainian civilians from Russian strikes. The Patriot system is one of the only air defense platforms in Ukraine’s arsenal capable of intercepting the ballistic missiles that Russia has increasingly relied on to bombard Ukrainian population centers in recent months.
In a statement on X Wednesday ahead of the attack, Zelensky emphasized that the ability of Western allies to provide sufficient air defense resources would directly determine how many Ukrainian civilian lives are lost. “The protection of people’s lives depends directly on their willingness, or lack of willingness, to provide air defence missiles,” he wrote.
The attack also came alongside a reported counter-strike on Russian territory. Oleg Melnichenko, the regional governor of Penza, a city hundreds of kilometers inside western Russia, confirmed via Telegram that a drone attack hit a warehouse operated by major Russian online retailer Wildberries. One person was injured in the strike, Melnichenko said. Wildberries, often referred to as “Russia’s Amazon,” has seen its facilities repeatedly targeted in recent Ukrainian cross-border attacks.