Russia attacked Ukraine on Sunday with the largest drone assault so far in the war, the authorities said, killing at least five people around the country and breaching air defenses in the heavily guarded government district of the capital.
Ukraine’s Air Force said that Russia had launched 805 Iranian-designed Shahed exploding drones and decoys across the country, the latest in a relentless offensive that has continued unabated despite the Trump administration’s efforts to mediate peace talks. Russia also fired 17 cruise and ballistic missiles in the volley, according to the Air Force, which said nine missiles and nearly 60 drones had evaded air defenses and made impact.
A woman and her child were killed in the capital, Kyiv, according to the Ukrainian authorities. And smoke billowed from the large, colonnaded building where the Cabinet of Ministers convenes — a landmark in the city.
“Such killings now, when real diplomacy could have already begun long ago, are a deliberate crime and a prolongation of the war,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on social media. “It has been repeatedly said in Washington that sanctions will follow a refusal to talk.”
Officials said that Sunday was the first time since the war began in February 2022 that Russia had damaged a Ukrainian government building in Kyiv.
Rising on a hill and crisscrossed by leafy, cobblestone streets, the Kyiv government district lies at the center of rings of air defenses and is seen as the best protected area in the country. The cabinet building is near Parliament and Mr. Zelensky’s office.
But early Sunday, flames leaped from the windows of two upper floors of the cabinet building and firefighters flew in a helicopter to douse the blaze. Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, whose offices are in the building, later posted pictures of the aftermath showing a charred corridor, broken doors and dangling electrical wires.
The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, said that falling debris from a drone shot down by air-defense systems appeared to have started the fire.
Other cities around the country — including Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro, Kremenchuk and Odesa — also came under attack. One person was killed and 17 others were injured in Zaporizhzhia, while deaths were also reported in Sumy and Chernihiv, according to the local authorities. Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city in south-central Ukraine, and Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea, both sustained damage. In Kremenchuk, a drone hit a bridge over the Dnipro River, halting traffic.
Russia has ramped up its drone attacks since last fall, setting new records nearly every month for the number of weapons launched. Before Sunday’s assault, the largest attack was on July 9, when Russia launched 728 drones.
The drones, called Shaheds in Iran and Geraniums in Russia, are triangular craft about eight feet long and eight feet wide that have a bulging nose housing a warhead. Decoys are smaller, less precisely guided and carry less explosives or none at all.
While Ukraine has been able to shoot down about 80 percent of the drones launched by Russia, the weapons are cheap to manufacture and Moscow has relied on large volleys that can still kill people and damage infrastructure.
The recent ramp-up in the scale of drone attacks has coincided with President Trump’s efforts to broker a peace deal, which began in February with phone calls to Mr. Zelensky and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Through last fall and into this year, new Russian drone factories in the cities of Izhevsk and Yelabuga came online, according to military analysts, increasing Moscow’s capacity to build drones. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, said on Friday that Russia now produces about 2,700 Shahed-type drones per month.
Ukrainian Air Force statistics illustrate the significant increase. In the second half of 2024, Russia launched 8,740 drones — but in the first half of this year, Russia launched 21,317 drones, according to the air force.
Sunday’s assault came three days after European leaders — including Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France — met in Paris to propose a framework for security guarantees in postwar Ukraine, assuming a cease-fire or peace settlement is reached.
In the latest flurry of diplomacy aimed at stopping the war, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Putin at a summit in Alaska last month and with Mr. Zelensky and European leaders at the White House soon after. Russia said it would halt its invasion if Ukraine retreated from territory in the country’s Donetsk region, which Russia has tried and failed to seize since it started the war in 2022.
Ukraine proposed an unconditional cease-fire in March, but Russia has demanded concessions on territory, a cap on the size of Ukraine’s postwar army and a ban on treaties with allies to safeguard against a future invasion. It has continued a campaign of exploding drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, civilian infrastructure, military sites and other targets, despite the international calls for a pause.
Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014.
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