Russia pounded Kyiv with a large missile and drone attack early on Sunday, killing one person and wounding 20, authorities said, after Moscow threatened retaliation for strikes in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.
Multiple rounds of loud explosions were heard in the Ukrainian capital throughout the early hours of the morning.
“Tonight Kyiv region is once again enduring a mass enemy attack with strike drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles,” said Mykola Kalashnyk, the head of the regional ministry administration.
The blasts caused a residential building near the government district to shake, while dozens of people took shelter in an underground metro station in the city center.
Residents were instructed to stay in shelters as city authorities warned fires had broken out and city military administration head Tymur Tkachenko said one person had been killed and at least 20 wounded.
Ukrainian authorities and the US embassy had earlier warned of a possible significant attack on Kyiv after Russia said it would “punish” those responsible for deadly strikes in a part of eastern Ukraine under its control.
“The capital has come under a mass ballistic missile attack,” Tkachenko wrote on Telegram early on Sunday. He later said the air raid alert had been lifted.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said damage had been recorded in every district of Kyiv, adding that a strike on a school had sparked a fire, and another on a business center had led to people being trapped in a shelter.
Ukraine had been expecting a major attack after its own forces launched a drone barrage in the Russian-occupied east of the country, which Moscow said hit a college dormitory and killed at least 18 people.
Launched overnight on Thursday to Friday, the drone salvo — one of Ukraine’s deadliest such strikes in months — also wounded 42 in Starobilsk, in the occupied Lugansk region, trapping people beneath the debris.
Ukraine denied targeting civilians, saying it had hit a Russian drone unit stationed in the Starobilsk area.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday that those responsible would face “inevitable and severe punishment”.
On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Ukraine was “seeing signs of preparation for a combined strike on Ukrainian territory, including Kyiv”.
He said on social media that Moscow may deploy “various types of weaponry” including the nuclear-capable Oreshnik hypersonic missile. There were no initial reports that an Oreshnik had been used.
Similarly, the US embassy said it had “received information concerning a potentially significant air attack that may occur at any time over the next 24 hours”.
Ukraine regularly targets Russian-controlled areas of the country with drones, saying the strikes are retaliation for Russian attacks.
Russia deployed the Oreshnik missile, its newest hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, last year in Belarus, a Moscow ally bordering three NATO and EU member states: Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, as well as Ukraine.
Moscow has already used this missile twice since launching its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: in November 2024 against a military factory and in January 2026 against an aerospace center in western Ukraine near the NATO border. In both cases, the missiles were not carrying nuclear warheads. (AFP)
