For much of the war, Russia’s air assaults followed a battle-tested formula: first, waves of drones to saturate and tie up air defenses; then, once a path was cleared, a salvo of highly destructive missiles.
But as Ukraine now struggles with severe air defense shortages, Russia is going straight for the missiles. Overnight on Thursday, it opened a deadly air assault with a volley of ballistic missiles that resulted in several explosions across Kyiv, the capital, suggesting that some had hit their targets.
The change in tactics is a sign that the Russian military is growing more confident of penetrating Ukrainian defenses, after weeks of attacks that have depleted Ukraine’s stocks of interceptors. In some of Russia’s overnight barrages, the Ukrainian military has been unable to shoot down a single ballistic missile.
The Ukrainian authorities recently stopped releasing data on interception rates of these missiles, concerned about the alarming headlines it was generating. But the impact of Thursday’s attack was evident in the death toll and physical damage. At least 15 people were killed and about 40 injured in strikes that also damaged 30 residential buildings, a school and a children’s hospital, according to Ukrainian officials.
Explosions erupted across the Ukrainian capital shortly before midnight as the bombardment rained down. The thundering reverberated down to a subway station where some of the city’s three million residents had taken shelter, pitching tents and laying mats on the granite platform.
Worried that the gaps in aerial defenses have left them increasingly exposed, many Kyiv residents now spend several nights a week sheltering underground in subway stations and parking lots. Nearly 40,000 residents stayed in the capital’s subway stations overnight, according to the local authorities on Thursday.
Within minutes of the first strikes, Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv’s mayor, wrote on social media that buildings in several districts had been damaged and that emergency crews were rushing to help. “More missiles are still heading toward the capital,” he said.
In a statement on social media, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine described the assault as “a massive attack” that Russia “had been preparing for a long time, combining different types of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, aiming to cause as much damage as possible to civilian infrastructure.”
Ukrainian officials said the strikes had hit food warehouses and Red Cross facilities, though they did not specify the extent of the damage.
In his statement on Thursday, Mr. Zelensky again sounded the alarm about Ukraine’s weakened air defenses. He urged allies to provide more military assistance, especially U.S.-made Patriot interceptors, which remain the country’s most reliable defense against ballistic missiles.
In July, before the Ukrainian Air Force ceased publishing statistics on ballistic missile attacks, Ukraine intercepted less than a third of the ballistic missiles launched that month, according to a New York Times analysis of official figures.
Civilian deaths have risen in Ukraine as air defenses have faltered. Nearly 1,400 civilians were killed in the first six months of this year, a 37 percent increase from the same period in 2025 and a 114 percent increase compared with the year before, according to the United Nations.
Russian attacks have become so frequent that Angelina Shostak, a 50-year-old Kyiv resident, said on Thursday that she started every evening by setting out three chairs in her apartment’s corridor — one for her, one for her mother and one for her husband.
Ms. Shostak said that her mother could not get to an underground shelter quickly, so her family is left hoping that hunkering down in the corridor, with two walls separating them from the outside, will be enough to shield them from a strike or falling debris.
Her husband, who has served in the Ukrainian Army, bought headphones to protect his ears from the noise of explosions and of missiles roaring overhead, Ms. Shostak said.
“Before, we had hope, confidence that the air defense would intercept most of the missiles,” she added. “But now, when we don’t have enough to shoot them down with, we’re all constantly on edge.”
Olha Konovalova, Nataliia Novosolova and Kim Barker contributed reporting.
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