Kyiv, Ukraine
—
The death toll from Russia’s heavy bombardment of Ukraine’s capital this week has risen to 31 people, marking the deadliest single attack on Kyiv in a year, Ukrainian officials said on Friday.
The vast majority were killed in a single strike on an apartment block.
Rescue workers have now recovered the bodies of at least 28 people from the destroyed apartment block, including five children, the State Emergency Service (SES) told CNN. At least 159 people were also wounded in the blast.
“This is the highest number of injured children in one night in Kyiv since the beginning of the full-scale invasion,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
More than 100 rescuers scrambled to the scene in Kyiv’s western Sviatoshynskyi district, working through the night and removing more than 2,000 tons of rubble as they searched for survivors in an ongoing operation.
The building was one of dozens of sites in the Ukrainian capital struck by Russian missiles and drones in the overnight attack, according to Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration. He described the strike as a “direct hit” on the nine-story apartment building, hitting just before 5 a.m. local time Thursday (10 p.m. ET Wednesday).
“I was just sleeping. I woke up atop the rubble downstairs,” a survivor of the attack, Veronika, told Reuters news from the hospital, where she is nursing a broken leg. The 23-year-old was blown from the ninth floor of her apartment building.
On Friday, residents of a neighboring apartment block donned hard hats and helmets to retrieve what belongings they could from their homes. Excavators worked to clear away rubble and tear down the building torn in half by the Russian strike. Personal effects lay scattered amid huge pieces of cracked concrete. In one corner, behind the caterpillar treads of a backhoe, a makeshift memorial stood, with flowers, toys and photographs of dead loved ones.
“Once again, this vile strike by Russia demonstrates the need for increased pressure on Moscow and additional sanctions,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday. “No matter how much the Kremlin denies their effectiveness, sanctions do work – and they must be strengthened.”
Zelensky added that “in July alone, Russia used over 5,100 glide bombs against Ukraine, more than 3,800 “Shaheds” (drones), and nearly 260 missiles of various types.”
Russia also struck the regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv overnight into Thursday. A strike on a five-story block in the Donetsk region city of Kramatorsk, which partially destroyed the building, killed three people.
That was followed by more strikes on Ukraine overnight into Friday, which killed at least three civilians and injured 27 others.
This week, US President Donald Trump cited Moscow’s killing of Ukrainian civilians as he shortened a window for Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a ceasefire or face greater sanctions.
Meanwhile Friday, Putin said Russian forces are advancing along the entire line of contact in Ukraine, indicating no change in Moscow’s position one week ahead of the deadline the Trump administration gave him to reach a ceasefire.
The Russian leader said he hopes peace talks between Russia and Ukraine continue, but reiterated that the Kremlin’s maximalist war goals remain unchanged.
Zelensky on Friday reaffirmed his willingness to sit down with Putin for peace talks, calling for dialogue beyond “the exchange of statements and technical-level meetings.”
“We have heard the statements coming out of Russia. If these are signals of a genuine willingness to end the war with dignity and establish a truly lasting peace – and not merely an attempt to buy more time for war or delay sanctions – then Ukraine once again reaffirms its readiness to meet at the level of leaders at any time,” the Ukrainian president said in a statement.
The Kremlin’s aerial attacks on Ukrainian population centers have ramped up sharply this year, leaning heavily on cheap-to-manufacture drone swarms that are intended to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses.
Drone and missile attacks are launched nearly every night, with much larger salvos now happening more regularly. The interval between large-scale salvo attacks has gone from about a month to as little as two days, according to new analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington DC-based think tank.
Meanwhile, the number of munitions Russia uses in these larger scale attacks has risen from about 100 munitions several years ago to nearly 300 munitions in 2025, the CSIS analysis found.
