Russia pounds Kyiv with ballistic missiles, killing one, as Ukraine hits back with its biggest drone barrage in months

Russia launched a large-scale missile and drone attack on Kyiv overnight into Monday, killing a 21-year-old woman and wounding at least eight other people, Ukrainian officials said, in one of the heaviest strikes on the capital in weeks. Hours later, Ukraine answered with one of its largest drone strikes of the war, hitting an oil terminal near St. Petersburg and other targets deep inside Russia.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said one of the capital's metro stations, on the left bank of the Dnipro River, was damaged and that debris struck the ground floor of a 25-story residential building in the Solomianskyi district. Ukraine's Defense Ministry said energy facilities were the "main target" of the attack but that a clinic, a school and homes were also hit. President Volodymyr Zelensky said more than ten energy facilities were damaged and repair crews had been dispatched overnight.

The numbers

Ukraine's Defense Ministry said Russia fired at least 16 ballistic missiles at the capital region overnight, along with roughly 200 drones, including jet-powered Shahed models, aimed across the country, with strikes also reaching Kharkiv and Dnipro. Ukrainian officials said at least 550,000 households lost power as a result of the attack on the capital's grid, on top of outages from strikes earlier this month.

Russia's Defense Ministry, for its part, described the operation as a "massive" strike against sites tied to Ukraine's defense industry, saying it had hit facilities storing cruise missiles and drones as well as a data center in the Kyiv region, according to a Ukrainian defense ministry account carried by ABC News.

Ukraine's response came within hours. Russian officials said one person was killed and five were wounded on Sunday when Ukraine launched more than 1,000 drones across 15 Russian regions, setting fire to an oil terminal in St. Petersburg, cutting power to thousands of residents, and hitting a retail logistics center and a data center operated by Russia's largest social media company. Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Russian refineries and export terminals this year in an effort to squeeze the fuel supplies that finance Moscow's war effort.

How we got here

The exchange is the latest escalation in a monthslong pattern in which both sides have targeted each other's energy infrastructure ahead of winter, even as President Trump has pushed for a negotiated end to the war. Trump announced what he called an energy "ceasefire" in mid-October, but Ukrainian officials say Russian strikes on power plants and substations have continued largely unabated since, including attacks on Kyiv's heating plants on Oct. 13 and 14 that Zelensky at the time called "ostentatious disrespect" toward Washington.

Monday's attack also came two days after Trump, citing the national interest, waived a package of sanctions on Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which had been set to take full effect this week. The law, signed in September after clearing the Senate 86-11 and the House 262-159, lets the president waive its sanctions and tariff provisions, including penalties on major buyers of Russian oil, after certifying the move serves U.S. national interests and notifying Congress. Trump has said he intends to sign a separate deal with Moscow to purchase diesel fuel, and lawmakers from both parties criticized the waiver as premature given the continuing strikes.

Zelensky said Russia's response to recent ceasefire proposals has been "ballistic missiles, 'shaheds,' and killings," adding that President Vladimir Putin "doesn't even want to take any steps toward de-escalation."

Who is affected

The power loss hit roughly half a million Kyiv-area households heading into the colder months, compounding outages from earlier strikes this autumn and adding to the strain on a grid that has absorbed more than a hundred missile and drone attacks since the start of the heating season, according to Ukrainian officials. Ukraine's energy ministry has spent much of the past year working with American partners on hardening the grid against exactly this kind of attack, including joint work on passive defenses for power infrastructure, though officials say the pace of strikes has outrun the repairs.

In Russia, the governor of St. Petersburg and regional officials reported the casualties and outages from Ukraine's drone barrage, while Moscow-installed officials in border regions reported additional strikes on logistics and data infrastructure. The European Union has separately and repeatedly condemned Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure as deliberate targeting of civilian systems, a position it has restated at the OSCE's Permanent Council in Vienna.

Reaction

Ukrainian officials said they again received no advance warning of the ballistic missile attack from Western intelligence partners, a complaint Zelensky has raised repeatedly in recent weeks. He called the U.S. position "a denial of reality on the part of our partners," according to reporting from Kyiv carried by the Irish Times. Ukraine's air force said it did get a warning ahead of a second, smaller strike around 3 a.m., but not the initial barrage.

"I know a few nights ago there was a software problem involving their early warning system," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, adding that U.S. European Command was investigating the lapse.

Ukrainian officials say they went unwarned on at least three occasions in the past week; in one case they were told that bad weather over southern Russia had obscured missile launch preparations. Kyiv has also complained of slower U.S. deliveries of PAC-3 interceptor missiles and disruptions to Starlink service, which the Trump administration denies are deliberate, and says Washington has at times threatened to slow weapons deliveries unless Ukraine stopped striking Russian refineries. Separately, Pope Leo XIV called Zelensky to urge both sides to allow food and aid into Oleshky, a Russian-occupied city where roughly 2,000 people have been cut off for months, according to independent Russian outlet Meduza.

What happens next

Neither side has signaled it intends to pull back. Ukraine's air force has warned that further Russian strikes are likely as temperatures drop and both militaries press their respective energy-targeting campaigns through the winter. Kyiv's city administration said repair crews would work through the week to restore power to the affected districts before the next cold front arrives.

U.S. officials have floated a possible three-way summit involving Trump, Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss a broader settlement, though no date has been set. Monday's exchange underscored how far apart the two sides remain on the ground even as diplomatic channels stay open, and how little the past week's sanctions waiver and ceasefire talk have altered the pattern of strikes on both countries' infrastructure.