Russia launched drones, missiles and guided aerial bombs across Ukraine early Sunday, killing five people in a major nighttime attack that Ukrainian officials said targeted civilian infrastructure.
Moscow sent over 50 ballistic missiles and around 500 drones into nine regions, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Four people, including a 15-year-old, died in a combined drone and missile strike on Lviv, according to regional officials and Ukraine’s emergency service. The historic western city is often seen as a haven from the fighting and destruction farther east. At least six more people were injured, according to a statement by Ukraine's police force.
The strike left two districts without power and disrupted public transportation for a few hours early Sunday, Mayor Andriy Sadovyi reported. He added that a business complex on Lviv's outskirts caught fire following the strike, describing it as a civilian facility unlinked to Ukraine's war effort.
One person was also injured in the Ivano-Frankivsk region south of Lviv, according to regional head Svitlana Onyshchuk.
In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, an aerial assault killed a civilian woman and wounded nine other people including a 16-year-old girl, regional head Ivan Fedorov reported. He said Russia attacked with drones and guided aerial bombs.
Fedorov said the strike destroyed residential buildings and left about 73,000 households in Zaporizhzhia and surrounding areas without power.
Separately, six people including a child were injured in Sloviansk, a key city in the eastern Donetsk region that remains under Ukrainian control, after a Russian guided aerial bomb slammed into an apartment block, regional prosecutors said Sunday. They said Russian airstrikes on Saturday evening damaged over two dozen residential buildings in Sloviansk, as well as cars, shops and a cafe.
Zelenskyy on Sunday reiterated his call for Kyiv’s Western partners to send additional air defenses to combat Russia’s “aerial terror.”
“Today, the Russians again targeted our infrastructure, everything that ensures people can live a normal life. We need more protection, a rapid implementation of all defense agreements, especially on air defense, to make this aerial terror pointless,” he said in a Telegram post.
Ukraine has for months conducted its own long-range strikes on Russia, many of which have targeted Moscow’s oil infrastructure and contributed to persistent fuel shortages.
For its part, the Kremlin has ramped up attacks on Ukraine’s power grid ahead of winter, as in previous years since the full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Kyiv calls it an attempt to weaponize the weather by denying civilians heat, light and running water.
Moscow has also stepped up airstrikes on Ukraine’s railway network, which is essential for military transport, hitting it almost daily in the past two months. Russian drones on Saturday struck a railway station in the northern city of Shostka, killing one and wounding dozens.
On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin doubled down on warnings that any supplies of long-range weapons by the U.S. to Ukraine would badly hurt bilateral ties.
The potential supply of U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kyiv will signal a “qualitatively new stage of escalation, including in relations between Russia and the U.S.,” Putin said at a forum of international foreign policy experts in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Putin's remarks followed an apparent dramatic shift in Washington’s Ukraine policy, after U.S. President Donald Trump said late last month that he believed Ukraine could win back all territory lost to Russia.
Trump previously repeatedly called on Kyiv to make concessions to end the war, and ended Putin’s diplomatic isolation in the West by hosting him at a summit in Alaska on Aug. 15.
