Moscow attacks Kyiv following Zelensky’s return. A night of intense fighting across Ukraine

Kyiv, from our correspondent. Russia had already begun preparing a massive bombardment across the whole of Ukraine last weekend and was expected to wait until after the conversation between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Donald Trump before launching it. Last night, Zelensky was returning to Ukraine after meeting Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Lublin, Poland, and in his evening message to the Ukrainian people he said: “Be careful and look after yourselves.” This confirmed that the attack would come at around 1 am. In the hours leading up to this, Shahed drones were already attacking Ukrainian towns on the border with Russia, when reports came in that Russian bombers were taking off; confirmation came that the attack would be extended to the whole of Ukraine, including Kyiv, where sirens sounded alongside the explosions of the first ballistic missiles that struck several neighbourhoods in the capital, killing one person and injuring two. In addition to buildings, a covered market caught fire and a metro station was damaged; the casualty toll is provisional in the early hours of the morning, after the city had been under attack all night from missiles, drones and debris from the strikes.

Across Ukraine, eight people have been killed and more than thirty injured; the air force has intercepted fifty-five missiles and two hundred and sixty-five drones. The worst damage was reported near Kryvyi Rih, the city where Zelensky was born, and in Lviv, on the border with Poland. The Russian attack was extensive and widespread; missiles and drones reached as far as Ukraine’s western border, triggering alerts in Poland too – in Lublin itself, where just a few hours earlier the Ukrainian president had met Donald Tusk. Moscow is well aware of how little remains of Ukraine’s air defences and has stepped up its attacks with ballistic missiles, which Russia previously used sparingly because they are more costly to produce. Now Moscow is adopting a different strategy, deploying ballistic missiles on a massive scale, combining them with drones, cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles – last night, two were fired towards Kyiv, whilst one gutted a block of flats outside Kryvyi Rih – to demonstrate that it has plenty to launch against a Ukraine that has little with which to defend itself whilst it remains without Patriot batteries. And Kyiv will remain without them for a long time, despite ongoing negotiations with the United States to grant Ukraine a licence to manufacture interceptor missiles. It is not a quick process; in the meantime, Russia is bombarding the country in an attempt to force Kyiv to capitulate at a negotiating table that it has no intention of returning to any time soon. The message is that if the summer can be so deadly, Ukraine faces a winter of cold and possible attacks on its energy infrastructure, as happened earlier this year, when parts of the country were left without electricity or heating, with temperatures in some cities dropping to minus twenty degrees. Whilst the eastern front, in the Donbas region, is barely shifting, the Russian army is seeking to force cities to surrender. However, after four years of attempts, this has not materialised, and even yesterday, aware of the attack, the capital’s residents took to their shelters and gathered at underground stations around midnight, awaiting the arrival of the missiles. Resilience is also a matter of habit and discipline, especially in cities that find themselves under this combined fire every ten days; after a sleepless night, people get up and start their day on time, as if the missiles had never fallen.