Russia has hit Ukraine with the largest air attack since the war began, killing at least four people across the country and setting dozens of buildings on fire in the capital, Kyiv, including the main seat of the government, according to officials.
Russian forces launched 810 drones and 13 missiles in the overnight attack on Sunday, Ukraine’s Air Force said, causing damage across the north, south and east of the country, including the cities of Zaporizhzhia, Kryvyi Rih and Odesa, as well as in the Sumy and Chernihiv regions.
In Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that a young woman and her two-month-old son were killed when a nine-storey residential building was hit. Rescuers were still looking for the body of a third person believed to have been killed in the attack and buried “under the rubble”, he added.
Klitschko said buildings in the Darnytskyi and Sviatoshynskyi districts were also hit.
The attack, which also knocked out power in the city, left smoke rising from the roof of Ukraine’s main cabinet building in the historic Pecherskyi district, housing the offices of its ministers.
“For the first time, the government building was damaged by an enemy attack, including the roof and upper floors,” said Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko. “We will restore the buildings, but lost lives cannot be returned.”
“The world must respond to this destruction not only with words, but with actions. There is a need to strengthen sanctions pressure, primarily against Russian oil and gas,” she said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the strikes and issued a new appeal to allies to strengthen his country’s air defences.
“Such killings now, when real diplomacy could have already begun long ago, are a deliberate crime and a prolongation of the war,” Zelenskyy said in a post on X.
Sanctions on Russia
Russian attacks on Ukraine have increased in recent days, even as United States President Donald Trump stepped up diplomacy to end the three-and-a-half-year war, although those efforts have not yet been successful.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said it had carried out strikes on Ukraine’s military-industrial complex and transport infrastructure, according to the TASS news agency. Both sides deny targeting civilians.
Trump said on Sunday that he is ready to move to a second phase of sanctioning Russia, the closest he has come to suggesting he is on the verge of ramping up sanctions against Moscow or its oil buyers over the war in Ukraine.
He did not elaborate, however.
Until now, Trump, who met Putin last month, has resisted imposing tougher sanctions on Russia.
The US envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said on Sunday that the Russian attack looks like an escalation in the conflict.
“The attack was not a signal that Russia wants to diplomatically end this war,” Kellogg wrote on X.
Ukraine’s European allies also condemned the attack, including Sweden, Italy and Denmark. United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement that he was appalled by Russia’s “latest brutal overnight assault on Kyiv and across Ukraine”.
Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi, reporting from Ukraine’s central region of Dnipropetrovsk, said the attack triggered air raid alerts across most of the country. In Kyiv and the surrounding regions, the sirens sounded for more than 11 hours.
“What we see here is the increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles by Russia, which gives them a capacity to spread widely across the country, and these are certainly indicative of the fact that Russia is escalating attacks,” Basravi said.
Tens of explosions shook the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, cutting power to parts of it, while strikes on Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s hometown, in the same region, targeted transport and urban infrastructure, regional officials said.
In the southern city of Odesa, civilian infrastructure and residential buildings were damaged, with fires breaking out in several apartment blocks, regional Governor Oleh Kiper said on Telegram.
Ukraine hits Russian energy
On the battlefield, Russian forces are making slow but steady gains, Al Jazeera’s Basravi reported.
Russian forces have been “expanding the boundaries all across the eastern front to try to create a so-called grey zone”, he said.
“The Ukrainian military is saying that Russia is now shifting its tactics: it’s recently started to deploy small, experienced marine units, they say, that are trying to avoid direct clashes with Ukrainian forces that are putting up stiff resistance.
“The front line is moving in Russia’s favour, but Ukrainian forces have slowed that advance since the offensive began in March to a crawl at this stage”, Basravi said.
The Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday that its troops had taken control of the village of Khoroshe in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Al Jazeera could not independently verify the battlefield reports.
Meanwhile, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, Robert Brovdi, said that Ukraine attacked the Druzhba oil pipeline in Russia’s Bryansk region.
Brovdi posted on Telegram that “comprehensive fire damage” was inflicted on the pipeline.
The transit pipeline delivers Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, which continue to buy energy supplies from Russia, even after other European Union nations cut ties following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
A spokesperson for Hungarian refiner MOL said that crude oil deliveries to the country were running on schedule. A spokesperson for Slovak pipeline operator Transpetrol did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Moscow has not commented on the Ukrainian claim.
Russian air defence units reported that they destroyed at least 69 Ukrainian drones overnight, according to the RIA Novosti state news agency.
