There was no place to escape. In the middle of a workday, in the middle of the Ukrainian capital, a Russian jet-powered drone struck the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, setting the top two floors on fire and forcing people to crawl out of windows to await rescue.
As firefighters worked to put out the blaze, employees of an institution that has accounted for almost all major scientific discoveries in Ukraine were forced to climb down ladders to safety.
The drone hit just before 1:30 p.m. Kyiv time, when people at the academy were on lunch break but most were eating in their offices. The injured were treated on the sidewalk outside the building — a yellow, pink and white architectural landmark originally designed in the 1850s to be a countess’s boarding school for girls.
“My office is gone now,” said Vira Yevhrafova, 65, deputy chief scientist at the academy. “It was on the second floor — everything has collapsed, everything.”
Russia has been pounding Kyiv around the clock for weeks with new jet-powered drones, which have proved difficult to knock down with Ukraine’s current air defenses. Daily life in the capital is now punctuated by the rat-a-tat of air-defense guns, followed by a drone hitting something — a data center, a random street, a gas station, a warehouse, a high-rise building.
The attack on Monday killed at least one person and injured six. One man was missing. It is a typical toll for these drone strikes, now so regular they barely make the international news unless the images are particularly dramatic. The daughter of the woman who died showed up at the building and burst into tears. She was sad and angry but had nothing else to say.
Ukrainians lamented the sight of brilliant scientific minds fleeing their burning offices. “What an idiotic war,” Andriy Kovalenko, a lieutenant in Ukraine’s military and a former government official, posted on social media along with a photo of two people crawling out of windows.
The attack on the sciences academy was just the start of a busy day for rescue workers and military drone interception teams. Less than two hours later, another drone hit a clinic about a mile south. An hour after that, a drone was intercepted right as it hit a nearby building.
After yet another fatal strike in Kyiv, with yet another body covered by a sheet and then carted away, Ukrainians again took stock of Russia’s effort to bomb them into submission.
“I think what they want now is to frighten us and bring our lives to a halt,” said Vira Balanovska, 43, who walked with her 9-year-old daughter past the burning academy. “It’s not just about attacking warehouses so that we won’t have food. They also want to intimidate us — to make it so that we can’t work, study, do scientific research or really do anything at all.”
Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting.
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