KYIV, Ukraine — Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital and other cities across the country on Sunday with nearly 600 drones and dozens of missiles, killing at least four people in Kyiv and injuring dozens more in an hourslong assault.
“A massive Russian attack on Ukraine lasted for more than 12 hours,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said in a statement. “Savage strikes, a deliberate, targeted terror against ordinary cities.”
The Ukrainian air force said the attack started at 8:30 p.m. Saturday and continued into Sunday morning. Nearly 600 drones and 48 missiles were launched in the assault, it said in a statement, adding that five missiles and 31 drones had evaded air defenses.
Ukrainian officials said that more than 70 people were wounded across the country, including two rescue workers. They warned that the number of dead and injured was likely to rise as 1,500 rescue workers and police officers were deployed across 11 regions to treat the wounded and search for survivors.
Zelenskyy vowed to respond to the latest strikes as he urged Ukraine’s allies to maintain pressure on Russia to agree to an immediate ceasefire.
“This vile attack came virtually as the close of U.N. General Assembly week, and this is exactly how Russia declares its true position,” he said.
During his visit to New York for the annual gathering at the United Nations last week, Zelenskyy sought to convince world leaders that Russia’s war in Ukraine has set off “the most destructive arms race in human history” and that the violence ravaging his country would most likely spread.
Officials said that Kyiv, the capital, was the primary target of Sunday’s attack and that a 12-year-old girl was among the dead. Ukraine’s Cardiology Institute was damaged, officials said, along with an industrial bakery, a tire manufacturing plant, homes and apartment buildings.
The Polish Embassy and the European Union delegation’s building also suffered damage in the attack, Polish and EU officials said.
At least 38 people were injured in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia in Russian rocket attacks that damaged at least 14 apartment buildings, Ukrainian officials said. Attacks were also reported in Sumy, Odesa and other parts of the country.
Since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russian aerial assaults have ravaged Ukraine’s energy grid, targeted military production facilities, battered critical railway hubs and struck other vital infrastructure. The attacks have also targeted residential neighborhoods in what military analysts have described as a campaign intended to break the Ukrainian will to fight.
While the Russian military has failed to achieve any significant breakthroughs on the front in recent months, Moscow has increased the scale of its bombardments in an effort to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.
Russia has been using more and more attack drones in its assaults, having drastically stepped up production and manufacturing of the weapons. Ukraine, meanwhile, has increased its own long-range strikes inside Russia.
But the surge in Russia’s drone supply, coupled with new technology and tactics, has created a challenge for Ukraine, which enjoyed an advantage in drone warfare early in the war that Moscow has since worn down.
That all has added urgency to the race to develop countermeasures. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top military commander, told reporters in Kyiv last week that Ukraine had created a new branch of the air force focused on unmanned air-defense systems to help counter the growing threat.
He said that Ukraine was also equipping helicopters with specialized equipment to target drones and has experimented with using light aircraft with machine-gun mounts.
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