Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital and other cities across the country on Sunday with nearly 600 drones and dozens of missiles, killing at least four people in Kyiv and injuring dozens more in an hourslong assault.
“A massive Russian attack on Ukraine lasted for more than 12 hours,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a statement. “Savage strikes, a deliberate, targeted terror against ordinary cities. ”
The Ukrainian Air Force said the attack started at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday and continued into Sunday morning. Nearly 600 drones and 48 missiles were launched in the assault, it said in a statement, adding that five missiles and 31 drones had evaded air defenses.
Ukrainian officials said that more than 70 people were wounded across the country, including two rescue workers. They warned that the number of dead and injured was likely to rise as 1,500 rescue workers and police officers were deployed across 11 regions to treat the wounded and search for survivors.
Mr. Zelensky vowed to respond to the latest strikes as he urged Ukraine’s allies to maintain pressure on Russia to agree to an immediate cease-fire.
“This vile attack came virtually as the close of U.N. General Assembly week, and this is exactly how Russia declares its true position,” he said.
During his visit to New York for the annual gathering at the United Nations last week, Mr. Zelensky sought to convince world leaders that Russia’s war in Ukraine has sparked “the most destructive arms race in human history” and that the violence ravaging his country would likely spread.
Officials said that Kyiv, the capital, was the primary target of Sunday’s attack and that a 12-year-old girl was among the dead. Ukraine’s Cardiology Institute was damaged, officials said, along with an industrial bakery, a tire manufacturing plant, homes and apartment buildings.
At least 38 people were injured in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia in Russian rocket attacks that damaged at least 14 apartment buildings, Ukrainian officials said. Attacks were also reported in Sumy, Odesa and other parts of the country.
Since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russian aerial assaults have ravaged Ukraine’s energy grid, targeted military production facilities, battered critical railway hubs and struck other vital infrastructure. The attacks have also targeted residential neighborhoods in what military analysts have described as a campaign designed to break the Ukrainian will to fight.
While the Russian military failed to achieve any significant breakthroughs on the front in recent months, Moscow has increased the scale of its bombardments in an attempt to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.
Russia has been using more and more attack drones in its assaults, having drastically stepped up its production and manufacturing of the weapons. Ukraine, meanwhile, has increased its own long-range strikes inside Russia.
But the surge in Russia’s drone supply, coupled with new technology and tactics, has created a challenge for Ukraine, which enjoyed an advantage in drone warfare early in the war that Moscow has since worn down.
That all has added urgency to the race to develop countermeasures. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top military commander, told reporters in Kyiv this week that Ukraine had created a new branch of the Air Force focused on unmanned air-defense systems to help counter the growing threat.
He said that Ukraine was also equipping helicopters with specialized equipment to target drones and has experimented with using light aircraft with machine-gun mounts.
At the same time, Ukraine continues to rely on its Western allies for sophisticated air-defense systems to protect against Russia’s most powerful ballistic missiles.
Mr. Zelensky said on Saturday that his country recently received a Patriot system from Israel, with two more such systems expected to come in the fall. He did not say which country would provide the additional systems.
The American-made Patriot is one of the few systems in the world capable of reliably intercepting ballistic missiles. Ukrainian officials credit the system with saving thousands of lives.
Hours before the latest bombardment, Mr. Zelensky warned once again that the Kremlin has ambitions beyond Ukraine, saying that recent incursions by Russian drones and fighter jets into NATO airspace posed a direct challenge to the alliance.
“Russia is testing Europe’s ability to defend itself and trying to influence societies so that people start thinking: ‘Why are we giving so much to Ukrainians, but we can’t protect ourselves?’” Mr. Zelensky wrote on social media. “This is to reduce aid to Ukraine, especially before winter.”
Marc Santora has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia. He was previously based in London as an international news editor focused on breaking news events and earlier the bureau chief for East and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa.
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