Police and emergency workers survey pieces of a drone that damaged a five-story apartment building in Kharkiv on Tuesday. (Oksana Parafeniuk/The Washington Post)
KYIV — Russia launched a barrage of attacks over the last 24 hours, pummeling cities in Ukraine’s east, south and center with missiles, glide bombs and waves of drones — the latest onslaught in a deadly aerial campaign that intensified two months ago.
The building where the Estonian ambassador to Ukraine lives in the capital Kyiv was also hit and left burning by a drone.
Overnight, Russian glide bombs struck a building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, wounding more than 20, while drones struck the southern city of Odessa, killing one person and injuring nine, officials said.
The previous day, glide bombs hammered five locations in Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine, injuring at least 40 people and killing 10, including a 1-year-old child, officials said on Friday.
In total, at least 14 people were killed and close to 100 injured in the attacks.
On Thursday, after the assault in Zaporizhzhia, President Volodymyr Zelensky repeated calls for Ukraine’s Western allies to provide more air defense systems and allow Kyiv’s forces to conduct long-range strikes into Russian territory.
“Each such Russian attack not only kills people and destroys lives, but also destroys the meaning of any words about the alleged lack of talks with Russia or calls to the Kremlin,” Zelensky said in a post on Telegram.
Photos posted on social media by Ukraine Emergency Services showed a heavily-damaged residential building in Kharkiv and the rubble of a building that was leveled in Zaporizhzhia. Officials also said that a cancer clinic was struck in Zaporizhzhia.
Altogether, Moscow forces launched overnight one ballistic missile, four guided missiles and 92 drones, with Ukrainian air defenses shooting down all four guided missiles and 62 drones, Ukraine’s air force said on Telegram on Friday.
In Kyiv, an air raid alert lasted eight hours, with debris causing damage in five city districts, officials said.
Large-scale drone attacks have been an almost daily occurrence since the beginning of September; officials said there were assaults every day that month with Oct. 14 as the sole exception.
Zelensky said in Telegram posts this week that Russia launched some 2,000 drones against Ukraine in October and “now uses about 10 times more self-destructing drones than the previous fall.”
But the recent days have been particularly intense.
Overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, Russian forces launched some 106 drones against Ukraine, of which 74 were shot down by air defenses, Ukrainian officials said.
In Kyiv a “massive attack” that lasted about eight hours sparked fires and damaged “residential and nonresidential buildings” in six districts, with “more than 30 drones” shot down, the head of the Kyiv military administration, Serhiy Popko, said on Telegram on Thursday.
“Enemy drones entered Kyiv both singly and in groups,” Popko wrote. “The attack took place in waves, from different directions, drones entered the city at different heights — both very low and high.”
In the early morning, a drone struck an apartment building where Estonia’s ambassador, Annely Kolk, lives, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said in a post on X. Estonian media showed video footage of the heavily damaged upper floor of the building.
“She was lucky not to be harmed,” Tsahkna said. “No one is safe in Ukraine until Russia stops its aggression. Ukraine needs more air defense to protect its residents. We must not get used to this.”
Russian drone attacks, which rely heavily on Iranian-made Shahed self-destructing drones, have been a regular characteristic of the war, now more than two and a half years old.
Earlier this year, Moscow forces launched similar mass assaults against Ukrainian cities and especially the country’s energy infrastructure, before switching to targeting the country’s power stations with guided and ballistic missiles — with devastating effectiveness.
On Thursday, Andriy Kovalenko, head of the anti-disinformation center at Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said that Russia was using drones while it conserved its missiles, which take longer to produce.
“The pace of missile production does not allow the Russian Federation to wage an intensive war with their constant use, and drones are a cheaper tool, although the effectiveness of these UAVs is more suitable for terrorizing civilians than for using them for their intended purposes,” Kovalenko wrote on Telegram.
