Russia Pummels Kyiv and Tries to Plunge Ukraine Into Darkness

Flames engulfed the top floors of residential buildings. Red tracer bullets streaked through the night sky. Fireballs blazed in neighborhoods.

Kyiv endured another brutal night under attack on Friday as Russian missiles and drones struck it, killing six people and injuring dozens more, according to the local authorities. Firefighters and emergency workers were called to multiple districts of the city to deal with the consequences of the assault.

The targets of the overnight attack were not immediately clear. Most recently, Russian aerial assaults have regularly hit the country’s power grid, an effort to plunge Ukrainians into cold and darkness as winter looms. The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia had launched 19 missiles and 430 drones across the country, most of which were shot down. These figures could not be independently verified.

“This was a deliberately calculated attack aimed at causing maximum harm to people and civilian infrastructure,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media. “In Kyiv alone, dozens of apartment buildings have been damaged.” He added that missile debris had hit the Azerbaijani Embassy.

The attack also targeted Kharkiv in the northeast, limiting electricity and disrupting water supplies. But the main focus appeared to be Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where air-raid sirens first wailed shortly before midnight to signal the start of the attack and sounded again at 5 a.m. to mark its end.

Between those alerts, residents heard a grimly familiar soundtrack — the buzz of attack drones over neighborhoods, the staccato of heavy machine guns trying to shoot them down and the thud of air-defense missiles trying to intercept Russian ones.

Many residents of Kyiv sought shelter in subway stations, spending long hours underground. After nearly four years of war, Ukrainians have learned the routine and often bring inflatable mattresses, folding chairs or even tents to make nights on the cold subway-station tiles more comfortable.

By morning, the full scale of the damage in Kyiv had become clear. Falling missile or drone debris had gutted or blackened many building facades, torn through walls and sparked fires.

Residential buildings were hit “in practically every district,” said Tymur Tkachenko, the head of the city’s military administration.

Shortly before 8 a.m., Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said preliminary information indicated that three people had died in the attack. But he warned that the toll might change as rescuers combed through the damaged buildings, looking for bodies under the rubble.

Five hours later, Mr. Klitschko announced that the toll had doubled. All six victims were killed in a district northeast of the capital, along the route Russian drones often take as they approach Kyiv.

The toll was relatively limited compared with those of other major air assaults on the capital. It is largely a matter of luck — whether missiles tear through buildings or not. This time, they did not. In late August, they did: A Russian missile struck a five-story apartment building, killing 22 residents, including four children.

Mr. Zelensky said, “Ukraine is responding to these strikes with long-range strength,” a reference to Kyiv’s campaign of long-range strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure, aimed at cutting off the energy revenues that fuel the Kremlin’s war effort.

The Russian authorities in the southwestern region of Krasnodar reported an attack on the Russian Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk, where drones damaged an oil depot, a cargo container terminal and coastal facilities.

In recent weeks, Ukrainian forces have widened their long-range strike campaign to include Russia’s power grid, hitting several substations and thermal plants and causing temporary blackouts.

The targeting of the power grid appears aimed at bringing the war directly to Russian civilians while also signaling that Ukraine can respond in kind to Russia’s attacks.

Still, Russia retains the upper hand in the aerial war.

Last month alone, it launched more than 5,500 attack drones and decoys at Ukraine, forcing the country to defend its skies nearly every night. It also fired nearly 270 missiles, more than in any month since early 2024, according to a New York Times analysis of data published by the Ukrainian Air Force.

Mr. Zelensky has long urged Ukraine’s Western allies to supply more air defenses. He said he wanted to order Patriot air-defense systems from the United States, each of which costs at least $1 billion to build.

Kyiv, already strapped by nearly four years of war, has no choice but to press its European partners to foot the bill. Mr. Zelensky is scheduled to visit Greece and France on Sunday and Monday.

Ukrainian officials framed the attack on Friday as further evidence that Russia was determined to continue the fighting and that Kyiv urgently needed more support, including long-range weapons capable of hitting deep inside Russia.

“This brutal Russian attack demonstrates the urgent need for new contributions to Ukraine’s defense and new steps to increase pressure on Russia,” Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, wrote on social media.

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