Damage to Housing, Hospitals, and Utilities

At least 17 people have been killed as blocks of flats and warehouses were struck across the city overnight, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said. A children’s hospital and school were also damaged, and more than 40 people have been injured.

On Thursday, Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko warned residents of Desnyansky and part of the Dnipro districts may experience a disrupted supply of hot water following the overnight attacks. ‘Specialists are working to restore the damaged infrastructure,’ he said on Telegram.

Klitschko, speaking to BBC News at a wrecked apartment block in Kyiv, said Ukraine continues to face a shortage of air defence missiles and needs ‘ammunition, anti-missile systems—we need support from our partners.’

Call for International Support and Limited Defenses

Kyiv relies on Western allies for the supplies, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said that ‘as long as Ukraine does not have enough anti-ballistics, Russia will not seriously think about peace.’

He added: ‘The interceptors for the Patriots have not yet been replaced, and they are needed every day, each additional missile saves the lives of our people.’

An update released by the Ukrainian Air Force on Thursday morning implied that none of the Russian ballistic missiles used overnight were intercepted. Ukraine has relied on American supplies of Patriot interceptor missiles to combat Russian ballistic missiles, but the US has used much of its stockpile during the war with Iran.

Response from Russia and International Community

The Russian defence ministry said it used air, land, and sea-based weapons to target military facilities and warehouses, a spokesman for António Guterres said the UN secretary-general ‘strongly condemned’ the strikes and was ‘deeply concerned’ by the escalation of this conflict.

‘This is yet another tragic example of the alarming pattern of escalating strikes against populated areas,’ he said on Thursday.

The latest strikes on Kyiv began around midnight local time as air raid sirens sounded across the city, followed by the impact of Russian missiles, the strikes cut power to thousands of properties, plunging parts of the Kyiv region into darkness. A day of mourning is to be observed on Friday.

At a local school in the Solomyanski district, the windows were knocked out, and its playing fields were left covered in debris, and a nearby storeroom was destroyed, exposing the basement. The BBC was told it was a laundry and boiler house supplying heating to the surrounding apartment blocks.

Ukraine’s deputy intelligence chief told the BBC this was the kind of attack Russia was planning ahead of the winter in order to make life difficult. Anastasiia Kovtun’s flat was in a nine-storey building that was hit in the attack.