Ukraine Drone Attacks: Russian Assault Hits Kyiv
Ukraine Drone Attacks: Full-Scale Russian Assault on Kyiv
Overview of the Drone Invasion
Again, a new crane, and with our correspondent of a crag in Kyiv now in the aftermath of the biggest rush and aerosol since the start.
It’s a full-scale invasion with more than 800 drones and decoy drones. These have become a regular method used by Russian forces to confuse and overwhelm Ukrainian air defences.
Missiles were fired amid the overnight attack; Ukraine reported they shot down 747 drones and missiles. You can see the damage of what got through in the centre of Kyiv here and the screen close to Maidan Square in the heart of the city.
The main government building is up in smoke, the seat of Ukraine’s Cabinet and its ministers. In a separate simultaneous attack, four people were killed in Kyiv and elsewhere. Residential areas, including streets and nurseries, were also reported hit.
Eyewitness Accounts from Kyiv
Let’s try and get a sense of what’s been going on. Let’s bring in Gulliver Cragg in Kyiv. Good to see you tonight. Gulliver, talk us through first of all what today was like for you as well to live through and report on and what we know.
Well, my day started heading out to do a live on France 24 this morning. I first came up to this square, which is Europe Square, just near Mydn Square.
In the distance behind me, you can see the government building; it’s the further away building. The sun is just going down on it. This morning when I came, there was smoke billowing from the roof, and it was a very striking and disturbing thing to see.
There was an atmosphere in Kyiv of things having just got a little bit more worrying because, of course, that is the most well-protected area of the Ukrainian capital. The Ukrainians had been very pleased with themselves, as they managed to get a couple of drones to hit something in the Kremlin in Moscow.
Never before had the Russians managed to start a fire in the government district in Kyiv, and so it leads people to feel more worried. My day went on going to one of the residential areas that was hit—the building where a two-year-old baby had been killed with her mother.
And once again this mixture of great sadness and the solidarity that you see of everyone getting together, various NGOs, and just local people trying to help those who suffered, who’ve been injured or have lost property and so on.
Security Challenges for Kyiv
A serious security issue for Kyiv that must be a worry. Gulliver, the breaches you say in the highly protected area in the city, what are you hearing about that?
The sheer volume of drones that the Russians are able to send—over 800 this time. I mean that’s across the whole country; they didn’t all target Kyiv, but clearly the intention is to overwhelm the Ukrainian air defences.
Clearly, there is a point beyond which the Ukrainian air defences are overwhelmed, and it’s a source of great concern for which nobody seems to have any kind of magic answer that they think could solve this issue.
Technically, one of the things that the Ukrainians have been developing is interceptor drones—drones that fly up and cut the incoming Russian drones down from the air. They’ve been buying and building more and more of them, but nobody says that this is a panacea.
Some of the adapted versions that the Russians have been making—Iranian Shahed-type drones—have what’s called reactor engines. They’re much faster than the Ukrainian interceptor drones, basically meaning that the Ukrainian interceptor drones are ineffective against those ones.
Those super-fast ones, as I understand it, are very expensive, and the Russians don’t have that many of them. Another tactic the Ukrainians have been adopting to try to limit Russia’s capacity to launch these massive attacks is to target the Russian production and storage facilities for drones inside Russia.
They claimed to have had some success with that, but we can only assume that things would be even worse if they hadn’t had those successes because they clearly have not been able to stop Russia from increasing its capacity to send more and more drones Ukraine’s way on a single night.
Political Reactions and Public Sentiment
When it comes to any prospect of a ceasefire after the Alaska meeting and the sense of frustration now from President Trump, you know, you’ve been there throughout, apart from your occasional downtime to go back and forth and see the situation. As you do every day, how would you describe the mood in Kyiv and among politicians?
Well, Julia Spirito, the prime minister, in a video that she posted from inside the burnt-out offices in the government building, was saying she hoped that this would mean the message would get through that the Russians clearly don’t want peace and that therefore the Ukrainians need to receive more support and more pressure needs to be put on Russia.
A glimmer of hope, I think, coming from Scott Besan, the US Treasury Secretary, who talked of the possibility of bringing the Russian economy to its knees, or words to that effect. I think Ukrainians would like to hear Donald Trump saying something like that rather than just his Treasury Secretary because, of course, one wonders how much influence he actually has over what the president’s policy is going to be.
Everybody seems to think that a lot depends on what Donald Trump will decide to do, and it’s very hard to predict what he will decide. But there is a sort of determination to resist no matter what and hope that the Europeans are pulling together and that Ukraine will be receiving more support from Europe.
Apart from the worry about these long-range attacks and the fear, there is also, to a certain degree, a sense of pride that the Ukrainian army has held out on the front line for this long. Despite the intensity of the Russian attacks in Donetsk, the Russians have not made very much territorial progress this summer, less than they hoped for.
Calibre, it’s always good to talk to you. You can get clarity from the correspondent in Kyiv.
✍️ I am Chitta Majhi, and for the last two years, I have been writing blogs on trending stories, viral news, and global issues. With in-depth knowledge across sectors, I bring simple words, clear insights, and honest views to help readers understand what’s shaping our world.
