Russia Fires More Than 70 Missiles and 280 Drones at Ukraine, Killing 10 — and One Missile Lands in Poland
NATO scrambled fighter jets after a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace and came down in a field in Lublin province. Six members of one family, including three children, were killed near Kryvyi Rih.
A Russian ballistic missile and drone barrage across Ukraine overnight killed at least 10 civilians, including children, and wounded more than 50 others, Ukrainian officials said Thursday. NATO scrambled warplanes after one of the missiles crossed Ukraine's western border and came down inside Poland.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at least 10 Ukrainian regions were hit, with dozens of homes, businesses and infrastructure sites destroyed or damaged. Russia launched more than 70 missiles, a significant number of them ballistic, along with over 280 attack drones, of which more than 260 were intercepted. The scale of the attack suggested Moscow was probing a gap Kyiv has been warning about for weeks: a critical shortage of Western-supplied anti-ballistic interceptors, made worse because the war with Iran has drained U.S. stockpiles of Patriot missiles.
The deadliest strike hit the Dnipropetrovsk region, where six people were killed and 10 wounded, said Oleksandr Hanzha, head of the regional military administration. Among the dead near Kryvyi Rih — Zelenskyy's hometown — were a 6-year-old girl and boys aged 11 and 17, along with their parents. Two more children were pulled alive from the rubble. "It was an ordinary home, blown to smithereens by a ballistic missile," Zelenskyy wrote on X. In Kyiv, ballistic missiles killed a 31-year-old man and wounded two others, according to the National Police, while more than 56,000 people spent the night sheltering in the capital's subway stations. A cruise missile strike on the western city of Lviv killed one person and wounded more than 30, including children aged 6, 13 and 15, said Maksym Kozytskyi, head of the Lviv regional military administration. A drone hit warehouses in the Poltava region, killing one, and three glide bombs on an industrial zone in Kherson killed a 56-year-old man.
The incident that rippled furthest beyond Ukraine was a single missile. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile violated NATO airspace over Poland. NATO forces there scrambled two fighter jets, an attack helicopter and two other aircraft and activated ground defenses, said Col. Michael O'Connell, spokesperson for the alliance's military command in Belgium. The missile vanished from radar; a helicopter crew flew to its last known position and found a probable impact site in farmland in Lublin province. Polish news agency PAP reported that investigators recovered fragments consistent with a Kh-101. No one was hurt and nothing was damaged.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte called it "yet another reckless act by Russia and a dangerous consequence of its war against Ukraine." Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who had met Zelenskyy in Lublin on Wednesday to discuss defense, called it "a very serious incident" but added: "There are absolutely no reasons to believe that Poland was the target." NATO's military commander, Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, told Poland's defense chief, Gen. Wiesław Kukułan, that the alliance "will continue to take all necessary measures to defend NATO territory."
Russia's Defense Ministry said it had targeted Ukrainian air bases, arms factories, drone plants and storage depots, plus facilities for missiles, aircraft repair, electronics and chemicals. It also said its air defenses downed 258 Ukrainian drones overnight. Ukraine's own long-range campaign continued to bite: a Wildberries warehouse in Russia's Penza region burned after a strike that injured four people and forced 200 workers out, with additional depots hit in Sarapul and the Perm region. That brought to 14 the number of the retailer's warehouses struck by Ukrainian drones in under two weeks. Ukraine accuses Wildberries of supplying goods usable by the Russian military. Separately, Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, said drone crews destroyed four more tankers from Russia's sanctions-evading "shadow fleet," bringing the total to 205 since the operation began on July 6.
The barrage landed two days after Zelenskyy met President Donald Trump and American defense executives in Washington to press for faster and larger deliveries of Patriot systems. Trump has promised to license Ukraine to build its own, but production would take many months. "This Russian terror once again proves that protection against the Russian missile threat is the most important task when it comes to saving the lives of our people," Zelenskyy said.
Originally reported by NPR.