Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack overnight Monday into Tuesday, targeting Kyiv and other cities, strikes that the Russian Defense Ministry said were a response to a May 22 Ukrainian drone attack that hit a college in Starobelsk in the Luhansk Oblast and killed 21 students.
According to Ukrainian officials, the Russian attacks on Tuesday killed at least 22 civilians, including a three-year-old and an eight-year-old, whose bodies were pulled out of the rubble of an apartment building in the central city of Dnipro. Officials said a total of 16 people were killed in Dnipro and six were killed in Kyiv.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed the attacks targeted “enterprises of Ukraine’s military-industrial sector, fuel and transport infrastructure used by the Ukrainian army, and military airfields” and were carried out using “airborne, ground-based and seaborne long-range precision weapons, including air-launched hypersonic ballistic missiles and attack unmanned aerial vehicles.”
The ministry said that targets in Kyiv included “facilities producing attack UAVs” and three Ukrainian army recruitment centers. In Dnipro, the ministry claimed Russian forces targeted a facility used to build components “for long-range attack UAVs and missile armament, and also a logistics center were hit” as well as a “logistics center.”
Russia also announced strikes it claimed hit military or military-industry targets in the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Cherkasy, Khmelnytskyi, Kirovohrad, and Zhytomyr. The Ukrainian Air Force said that Russia fired a total of 73 missiles and 656 drones and claimed that Ukraine’s forces destroyed or suppressed 40 missiles and 602 drones.
The massive attack came after Russia warned the US and other Western countries to evacuate personnel from Kyiv as Russia was preparing for a major response to the Ukrainian drone attack in Starobelsk. More escalations could come as Russia vowed it would target “decision-making centers” in Kyiv, likely a reference to underground military headquarters, where US and NATO military officers are believed to be based.
Russia’s escalation came as the civilian death toll in Ukraine’s attacks on Russian regions and Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine has been rising. The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that over the past week, 35 Russian civilians have been killed by Ukrainian attacks, more than 90% of them by drones.
