Russia launched a “massive” night-time barrage across Ukraine that killed at least four people, wounded 25 and damaged 20 residential buildings in Kyiv and its suburbs, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, adding a drone also hit the Embassy of Qatar in the capital.
The overnight assault combined ballistic and cruise missiles with swarms of drones as temperatures plunged to minus 10 C and power outages spread. Zelensky said Russia fired 13 ballistic missiles, including the hypersonic Oreshnik, and 22 cruise missiles, and launched 242 drones across the country.
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Kyiv was the worst hit, authorities said. An ambulance worker was among the dead in what officials described as a double-tap strike on a residential building that targeted rescuers. “There was a second strike on one of the residential buildings — precisely at the moment when first responders were providing assistance after the first strike,” Zelensky said. Interior Minister Igor Klymenko called it a “deliberate attack on the emergency services,” saying the capital and surrounding region “suffered the most” and that 20 other nonresidential buildings in Kyiv were also damaged.
Ukrainian officials said the Oreshnik, an intermediate-range ballistic missile President Vladimir Putin has boasted is impossible to intercept, struck infrastructure just before midnight in the Lviv region near Ukraine’s western border. The air force said the missile was traveling at about 13,000 km/h. Russian military bloggers claimed it hit a major gas depot.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Russia’s use of the Oreshnik so close to the European Union and NATO frontier poses a “grave threat” to European security and urged partners to tighten pressure on Moscow. Russia’s Defense Ministry said it targeted critical infrastructure using the Oreshnik, attack drones and long-range precision weapons, and framed the launch as a response to what it called an attempted Ukrainian drone strike on one of Putin’s residences — an allegation Kyiv dismissed as “an absurd lie.”
U.S. President Donald Trump said he does not believe the strike on the residence occurred, but that “something” unrelated happened nearby.
The latest barrage followed a U.S. Embassy warning in Kyiv that a “potentially significant air attack” could occur in the coming days. It also came as Kyiv and Western allies debate postwar security guarantees and the parameters of any cease-fire nearly four years into Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
European officials this week discussed deploying troops after any cease-fire. Moscow, which launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 in part to prevent NATO expansion, rejected that outright. Any Western forces stationed in Ukraine would be “considered legitimate military targets,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, labeling Ukraine and its American and European backers an “axis of war.”
Zelensky said a bilateral agreement on U.S. security guarantees was “essentially ready for finalisation,” while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged a cease-fire deal remained “quite far” given Russia’s position. In its first response after a Paris summit where leaders outlined postwar guarantees — including a U.S.-led monitoring mechanism and a multinational force — Russia called the plan “dangerous” and “destructive.”
Key territorial issues remain unresolved. Russia, which occupies about 20% of Ukraine, has insisted on full control of the Donbas region as part of any settlement — a term Kyiv rejects. Russia’s army also claimed to have captured another village in the Dnipropetrovsk region as its slow advance grinds on.
As missiles and drones rained down on Ukraine, cross-border strikes hit Russia’s Belgorod region, where Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said more than half a million people lost power or heating and nearly 200,000 were cut off from water.
Kyiv officials said nearly all districts in the metropolitan region came under attack overnight. With temperatures well below freezing and repeated strikes on energy infrastructure, authorities warned that tens of thousands would face extended outages, even as firefighters picked through debris at charred high-rises and residents took shelter in subway stations.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
