Russia pounded Ukrainian cities overnight with a barrage of missiles and drones that killed at least eight people and wounded dozens of others, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday. The attack was the latest in a summer campaign of large-scale aerial assaults as Moscow apparently seeks to capitalize on Ukraine’s dwindling air defenses.
The overnight attack pushed Russia’s use of ballistic missiles to a new monthly record. Russia has fired 126 ballistic missiles at Ukraine so far in July, surpassing the previous record of 118 set in February, according to a New York Times data set based on figures from the Ukrainian Air Force.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Russian weapons had hit places across the country, from the western city of Lviv, where emergency crews searched for survivors amid the rubble of a destroyed building, to the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, where a family of five was killed, including three children.
“Two other children were pulled alive from the rubble,” Mr. Zelensky said in a social media post about the strike in Dnipropetrovsk. “It was an ordinary home, completely destroyed by a ballistic missile.”
During the attack, a Russian cruise missile also entered the airspace of Poland, a NATO member, according to the Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha. It was unclear whether the missile had struck Polish territory, but the authorities there said that an “unidentified object” had crossed into Poland’s airspace overnight and that police officers had later found a crater about 10 yards across, along with debris, in a field in the country’s southeast.
Russian missiles have briefly entered Polish airspace during previous attacks on western Ukraine but have not hit Poland itself. Any confirmed strike on a NATO member would sharply escalate tensions between the military alliance and Russia.
The latest attack underscored Ukraine’s growing vulnerability to Russia’s expanding missile campaign. Mr. Zelensky has warned for weeks that Ukraine is running out of air defense capabilities, especially Patriot interceptors, the most reliable weapon that Western allies have given Kyiv to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles.
Ukraine has pressed its Western allies for more Patriots, with Mr. Zelensky raising the issue again during a visit to the White House on Tuesday. But global inventories of the interceptors are under severe strain from multiple conflicts around the world.
“All of our partners know how they can help and what they can help with,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on social media on Thursday, after the overnight attack. “Delays in assistance, delays in the delivery of antiballistic missiles leads directly to the kind of destruction and casualties that, unfortunately, we are witnessing today.”
Short of Western-supplied air defenses, Ukraine has assembled a patchwork of air defenses to try to counter Russia’s attacks. Those include mobile teams firing aging machine guns at low-flying drones, small drones intercepting larger Russian drones, and fighter jets launching missiles at Russian cruise missiles.
Russia’s ballistic missiles, however, present a far greater challenge that can only be dealt with by advanced systems such as the Patriot. This month, President Trump gave Ukraine permission to produce the Patriot interceptors under license. But experts say it will take time for Ukraine to start production. Ukraine is also developing its own air defense system, but it remains unclear whether it will be effective against Russia’s ballistic missiles.
Kim Barker contributed reporting.
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