Russia Unleashes 656 Drones and 73 Missiles on Ukraine in Overnight Barrage That Kills at Least 17

Russia battered Ukraine with one of the heaviest aerial assaults of the three-year war overnight into Tuesday, firing 73 missiles and launching 656 attack drones at Kyiv and cities across the country, killing at least 17 people and wounding more than 100, Ukrainian officials said.

At least six people were killed in the capital, while 11 died in the central city of Dnipro, among them a child, according to Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, who said the most significant damage was concentrated in the Kyiv, Dnipro and Kharkiv regions. Rescue crews worked through the morning in Kyiv's Podilskyi district, where the upper floors of a nine-story residential building were sheared off in the strike. "People may still be trapped under the rubble," said Ruslan Stefanchuk, the chairman of Ukraine's parliament.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said four medical facilities were among the buildings damaged in the capital. Beyond Kyiv and Dnipro, the barrage struck the regions of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Khmelnytskyi and Sumy, hitting residential blocks and civilian infrastructure across a broad arc of the country. The weapons included high-precision, long-range air-, land- and sea-launched munitions as well as hypersonic aeroballistic missiles, the type Moscow has increasingly leaned on to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.

Ukraine's air force said its defenders destroyed or suppressed 602 of the incoming drones and 40 of the missiles — a high interception rate that nonetheless left dozens of weapons to reach their targets in a single, concentrated wave. Russia's defense ministry, for its part, claimed it had shot down at least 148 Ukrainian drones over the same period, underscoring how both sides have escalated long-range strikes even as on-and-off diplomatic contacts sputter.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy renewed his plea for Western air cover, arguing that the scale of the bombardment showed Kyiv could not hold the line alone. "Europe needs its own anti-ballistic defense so that this war can finally end," he said. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha struck a defiant note, insisting the strikes were a sign of weakness rather than strength: "Moscow is losing on the battlefield. No number of missiles can change this."

The attack followed a pattern of intensifying mass strikes in recent weeks, including a barrage on May 28 that sent roughly 600 drones and 90 missiles at Kyiv and a record 30-hour assault in mid-May that Ukrainian officials said involved about 1,600 drones and missiles. The relentless pace has hollowed out stocks of interceptors and pushed Ukrainian cities to brace, night after night, for the wail of air-raid sirens.