Moscow launched more than 200 missiles and drones across a wide swath of Ukraine on Monday, damaging energy facilities and sending residents of Kyiv into basements and subways to seek shelter. President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the assault as “one of the largest strikes” of the 30-month-old war.
The strikes occurred at a volatile time in the conflict, coming against the backdrop of Ukraine’s cross-border incursion into southern Russia — the first invasion on Russian soil since World War II. On Monday, Ukraine’s forces continued to try to advance in the region.
The offensive into the Kursk region has shifted the dynamics of the war after months in which Kyiv’s forces were on the defensive in Ukraine’s East. The push has slowed in recent days, but Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday that Ukrainian forces had advanced by one to three kilometers and taken control of two more settlements. It was not possible to verify the claim independently.
At the same time, Russian troops have been attacking relentlessly in Ukraine’s East, closing in on the key city of Pokrovsk and razing towns and villages with artillery barrages and glide bombs.
The drone and missile attacks on Monday, which began around dawn, targeted energy infrastructure in the capital, Kyiv, and in the regions of Lviv and Rivne in the West and Zaporizhzhia in the Southeast, the authorities said.
The strikes appeared to be an escalation of a Russian campaign against Ukraine’s power grid and caused damage significant enough to cause blackouts in Kyiv and other cities, even though the Air Force claimed a higher rate of interceptions than usual during the attack.
”Like most previous Russian strikes, this one is just as vile, targeting critical civilian infrastructure,” the Ukrainian leader said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. “There is a lot of damage in the energy sector,” he said, adding that crews were repairing the damage.
Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure in attempts to damage the economy and compound civilian misery caused by the war.
Officials said eight people had been killed and more than 20 others injured on Monday.
Air-raid sirens have become a grim routine for many in Ukraine, and on Monday people in Kyiv sought shelter in basements. One video posted on social media showed a crowd in the city’s subway system, whose stations are deep underground, singing a song in praise of the city. The video had not been verified independently.
On Monday, the Ukrainian authorities were struggling to cope with problems apparently related to the air attacks. The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, reported power and water outages in some parts of the city, and the head of the regional administration in Lviv, Maksym Kozytskyi, also reported power failures.
In the city of Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, the attack damaged an apartment building, the city’s mayor, Ihor Polishchuk, wrote in a post on social media. He later said that one person had been killed. A 69-year-old man also died in the Dnipropetrovsk region of southern Ukraine, according to the governor, Serhii Lysak, while the governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, Ivan Fedorov, said that a man had died in an attack there.
There were also deaths in Kharkiv and Zhytomyr regions, the local authorities said.
The Ukrainian casualty reports could not be confirmed independently, and the Russian Defense Ministry, which typically remains silent about attacks it conducts against cities and other civilian targets in Ukraine, said nothing on its Telegram channel.
The rate at which the Ukrainian Air Force said it was intercepting drones and missiles dipped earlier this year as the U.S. Congress debated whether to keep sending American-made interceptor missiles, and stocks dwindled. Supplies resumed in the spring.
Ukraine’s Air Force claimed a higher-than-typical rate of interceptions during Monday’s attack, saying it had shot down or electronically disabled 201 of the 236 missiles and exploding drones Russia fired. The statement did not elaborate on how Ukraine had achieved the high rate, which could not be independently verified.
It said “all available weapons and equipment were used,” including fighter jets, ground-launched interceptor missiles and teams of soldiers with machine guns.
The strikes came a day after a missile strike on a hotel in the eastern city of Kramatorsk killed a British safety adviser working with a team of journalists from the Reuters news agency and wounded two of Reuters’s reporters. One of the journalists remained in critical condition, while the other had been discharged from hospital, Reuters said in a statement on Monday.
Ukraine’s state prosecutor said on social media said it had opened an investigation into possible war crimes and that the residential neighborhood where the hotel was located had been deliberately targeted by Russian forces — though it is not known whether the hotel itself was a target.
More than 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to United Nations data.
Ukrainian leaders used Monday’s attack to renew their call for permission to use weapons systems provided by the country’s allies in NATO, including the United States, to strike military targets in Russia. Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister, also called on Ukraine’s western neighbors to shoot down Russian missiles flying inside Ukraine near their borders, to ease the burden on Ukraine’s air defense forces.
“None of these decisions are escalatory,” Mr. Kuleba said on social media. “To the contrary, they will deter Russia.”
The Polish military said it had scrambled jets in its own air force during the attack and that one airborne object, probably a drone, had crossed into Polish airspace, Polish news media reported. The object most likely crashed about 18 miles from the Ukrainian border in Poland, the military said, adding that a search was underway.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry also issued a warning to Belarus on Sunday after Belarus massed troops from its own army and those serving in Russia’s Wagner mercenary group to an area near Ukraine’s border, near the Belarusian town of Gomel. The movements began after Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region of Russia.
“We warn Belarusian officials not to make a tragic mistake for their country under Moscow’s pressure,” the statement said. If the forces attack over the border, the statement said, “all troop concentrations, military facilities and supply routes in Belarus will become legitimate targets.”
Ukraine’s allies in NATO, including the United States, have provided the country with air defenses, but they are most effective in shielding Kyiv as well as strategic military and economic locations. Other cities are left thinly defended, sometimes by little more than soldiers who try to intercept drones and cruise missiles by firing machine guns mounted on the beds of pickup trucks.
Russia has been attacking Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones every few days in addition to launching daily barrages of artillery, mortar fire and missiles in areas near the front lines. On July 8, a missile slammed into Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, which is in Kyiv, putting it out of action without killing any children. On the same day, attacks across the capital killed more than 30 people.
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