Key developments on Oct. 26:
© David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Russian drones struck a 24-story apartment building in Kyiv, a university building in Kremenchuk, warehouses, and hypermarkets overnight on 21 October, killing two people in the capital and an elderly couple near Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said. The attack went well beyond Ukraine’s power grid, hitting places where people live, study, and shop. Over the past day, Russian strikes also killed three more civilians and injured dozens across several oblasts.
Russia has kept up nightly drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities through the autumn, mostly aimed at the energy system. It struck Ukraine’s energy 76 times during a US-declared truce, and fired 39 ballistic missiles at the grid three days after Washington announced it. This time the targets also included homes, a university, warehouses, and shops.
Overnight, Russia launched 186 Shahed-type and other attack drones, 88 of them jet-powered, along with Iskander-K cruise missiles, Ukraine’s Air Force said. Air defenses downed or jammed 150 drones. Hits were recorded at 27 locations, and debris fell at 13 more.
A drone hit a 24-story residential building in Kyiv’s Sviatoshynskyi district at the level of the 20th floor, starting a fire, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. The fire spread over about 70 square meters, and rescuers found the bodies of two people while clearing debris, the State Emergency Service said. Two people were injured and hospitalized, Klitschko said, including a 46-year-old man who was walking past the building, according to the police.
In the Desnianskyi district, seven parked cars caught fire, the State Emergency Service said; police put the number at about 10. The evening before, drones hit a warehouse building in Desnianskyi and a transport facility in Solomianskyi district.
In the village of Korotych near Kharkiv, Russian drones killed an 81-year-old woman and an 83-year-old man, Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Syniehubov said. Rescuers recovered their bodies from the rubble of their house, the State Emergency Service said. Eleven people, including a two-month-old boy and an eight-year-old girl, were treated for acute stress, and 13 houses were damaged.
In Kremenchuk, a drone hit a building of the Mykhailo Ostrohradskyi National University, setting it on fire, the State Emergency Service said. Three people were injured, including a 16-year-old who was hospitalized with a concussion, Poltava Oblast Governor Vitalii Diakivnych said. In the Poltava community, drones damaged an administrative building and warehouses.
In Lviv Oblast, an attack set fire to an enterprise in a village in Lviv district and injured two people, while a house was damaged in a neighboring village, the State Emergency Service said. In Uman, drones hit a hypermarket and damaged a hotel, injuring one person, Cherkasy Oblast Governor Ihor Taburets said.
On the evening of 20 October, a drone hit an Epicentr hypermarket in Pervomaisk, Mykolaiv Oblast, injuring eight people, acting Governor Heorhii Reshetilov said. Russia also struck a hypermarket in Rivne Oblast several times that day, injuring four and forcing rescuers to pull back while they fought the fire, the State Emergency Service said.
The overnight strikes followed a day of attacks. In Kyiv, Russian strikes on 20 October killed one person and injured 21, three of them seriously, Klitschko said. An administrative building caught fire, rescuers freed four people trapped on its upper floors, and a healthcare facility was damaged, the State Emergency Service said. In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, two men were killed and seven people injured that day, regional officials said.
In Kharkiv Oblast, Russian attacks over the past day injured 11 more people in Kharkiv, Derhachi, and Shestakove, Syniehubov said. In Kherson Oblast, 13 people were injured, three of them children, the regional administration reported. In the Chernihiv region, an 89-year-old woman and a young woman were hurt in strikes on villages and on Novhorod-Siverskyi, Governor Viacheslav Chaus said, and a 21-year-old woman was injured in the Sumy community, according to the Sumy regional administration.
More than 5,000 subscribers lost power in Volyn Oblast’s Lutsk district, Governor Roman Romaniuk said. In Ternopil Oblast’s Kremenets district, 7,949 subscribers remained without power after earlier Russian strikes on energy facilities, the regional administration reported.
Key developments on Oct. 20:
Six people were killed in a Russian strike in the settlement of Nova Vodolaha in Kharkiv Oblast, including girls aged 1 and 11. Another 15 people were injured, including seven children, Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Syniehubov said on 20 October. Russian forces struck a park with a drone while families with children were there, Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Ivan Vyhivskyi said.
Russian forces continue to attack Ukrainian cities, killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure. The Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor’s Office has opened a war-crime investigation into the strike. The strike was aimed at people, Yurii Yurchenko, head of a police department in Kharkiv Oblast, said in a comment to Suspilne.
The Russian drone circled the park several times before crashing, Yurchenko said. He said the drone struck a tree near a café, and the blast wave and shrapnel hit people at the establishment. The attack came at around 16:30, the prosecutor’s office said, adding that Russian forces had preliminarily used a Geran-3 drone.
The Russian strike killed three women, aged 28, 34 and 36, a man around 40 years old, and two girls, aged 14 months and 11 years, Syniehubov said in his statement.
The youngest girl, named Anhelina, was born in August 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. Her mother, Inna, died in the hospital, he added.
Zelenskyy met with US Senators Richard Blumenthal and Thom Tillis, along with their colleagues from both parties and both chambers of Congress, according to a 19 October post on his social media accounts. During the meeting, he discussed the Russian attack in Kharkiv Oblast and showed lawmakers photographs from the scene, including one of the infant who was killed in a stroller.
“This is how Russia responds to the lifting of sanctions and the easing of pressure,” he said in the post.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine needs air defense and that no one should think about making money with Russia while it continues its war. He asked that sanctions on Russia stay in place until the killing stops, urged the US to “be strong” and apply Lindsey Graham’s law, and called on Europe to keep supporting Ukraine.
Russia attacked Kyiv with ballistic missiles in two waves overnight on 18–19 October. Information from partners did not arrive before the first wave, at around 23:00, Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said on national television. A warning came before the second wave, at around 03:00, but the window was short, he told NV.
Hours earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told NBC that US warnings of Russian ballistic launches were working again after three days without them, and that only the United States has that intelligence. Those warnings have for years given Ukrainian authorities several minutes to sound alarms and let civilians reach shelters before ballistic missiles hit.
“Once again, a Russian ballistic attack in several waves overnight, and once again there was no warning from partners,” Zelenskyy wrote. It was at least the third ballistic strike on Kyiv in a week to begin without warning from partners, following attacks on 12 October and 13 October.
One person was killed and eight injured in Kyiv, Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi said. A strike damaged a metro station on Kyiv’s left bank, and debris broke the rails beside it, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. City authorities said the damaged station was above ground, closed Chernihivska and Lisova stations, and said red-line trains would run only between Akademmistechko and Darnytsia. The attack also damaged a 25-story building, a medical facility, and the Cosmo Multimall shopping center in the Solomianskyi district, NV reported, and Zelenskyy said a school was hit too.
The attack also damaged one of Ukraine’s main ice arenas, on Shalett Street in Kyiv, which hosts Ukrainian championship hockey games and youth training, hockey Telegram channel Flamingo reported. Parts of the facade, metal structures, and roof were damaged, but the ice surface showed no significant visible damage, according to preliminary information, Suspilne reported.
Koretskyi said energy and infrastructure were the main targets, with damage in 11 oblasts. Russia also hit warehouses of medicines, railway stations, shops, and homes, he said. In Kyiv Oblast, Russian strikes injured six people in Irpin, including three children, and three more were missing, oblast head Tymur Tkachenko said. In Kharkiv Oblast, six people were injured, including two children, Koretskyi said. In Rivne Oblast, four people were injured, and one of them was hospitalized, regional police reported.
Zelenskyy said that more than 10 energy facilities were damaged and at least 550,000 families lost power. Ukrenergo reported new outages in 10 oblasts: Volyn, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Vinnytsia, Kirovohrad, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Mykolaiv. In Volyn Oblast, about 15 jet-powered Shahed-type drones targeted the region, and around 66,000 customers were without power on the morning of 19 October, oblast head Roman Romaniuk said. Kovel, Manevychi, and Lutsk were hit hardest, and no casualties were reported. In Vinnytsia Oblast, a critical infrastructure facility in Koziatyn was damaged, and power there would stay unstable for some time, city council secretary Iryna Repalo said, Suspilne reported.
Zelenskyy said Russia fired 16 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast. The Air Force reported that Russia also used Iskander-K cruise missiles and 269 drones, and that by 09:00 air defenses had shot down or suppressed four Iskander-K cruise missiles and 243 drones. Its preliminary count did not list any ballistic missiles among the intercepted targets.
On 19 October, Rubio told reporters in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, that “there’s been no pause” in intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, Reuters reported. He said he did not know where Zelenskyy was getting such claims and that he should focus on ending the war. He also said he did not know whether a failure had happened the previous night, but that a few nights earlier there had been a software problem with “their early warning system,” and that US European Command was looking into the strikes, The Guardian reported. US officials had not mentioned a software glitch before, and in at least one case Ukraine was told that bad weather over southern Russia had hidden launch preparations, the newspaper noted.
Ihnat said Ukrainian specialists and their partners were working to establish why information about the first launch had not arrived. He added that similar gaps had occurred during earlier attacks.
Zelenskyy wrote that when missile supplies for Ukraine’s air defense are blocked while Russia gets sanctions relief or delays, “this is, unfortunately, a denial of reality on the part of partners.” A night earlier, Russia had hit Ukraine’s energy system again, while Ukrainian drones set fire to St. Petersburg’s oil terminal despite Washington’s pressure to stop refinery strikes.
The front changes faster than any headquarters, so Ukraine’s war chief went to the people who fight on it. On 16 October, Ukrainian Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara met commanders and soldiers from front-line units to discuss the needs of the front, command practices that save lives, and ways to raise combat effectiveness, the Defense Ministry reported.
The front keeps changing, with technology, tactics and weapons shifting constantly, so decisions made far from it risk arriving late and costing lives. Khmara’s answer is to anchor ministry policy in the experience of the soldiers who fight, a continuation of the “machines over men” program.
"The front does not stand still. But the key thing is people. People will always be the foundation and the main value of the Defense Forces,” Khmara said.
He claimed that the decisions of the Ministry of Defense must take into account the experience of warriors, those who directly carry out combat missions at the front.
The meeting drew commanders from across the force, including the Airborne Assault Forces, the Marine Corps, the 93rd, 100th, 28th and 155th mechanized brigades, the 1st, 425th and 475th assault regiments, the 3rd and 59th assault brigades, and Azov.
The last one, the 1st Azov Corps of the National Guard of Ukraine, is actively fighting in the Donbas region, where units have led counter-operations to disrupt Russian advances toward fortress cities that have been holding Russia's operation since 2014.
Meanwhile, the 93rd "Kholodnyi Yar" Separate Mechanized Brigade took part in fierce battles for Ilovaisk, the Donetsk Airport, Debaltseve, and Bakhmut, as well as in the liberation of the Kharkiv Oblast. Both units are known for their extensive implementation of advanced military technologies, including ground robotic complexes, FPV strike drones, and innovative anti-drone electronic warfare systems.
The talk turned on how good commanders cut their own losses. Participants discussed command approaches that help save soldiers’ lives, use resources efficiently, and achieve combat results.
The ministry wants those methods studied and spread to other units, treating commanders' hard-won judgment as something to scale rather than leave in one brigade.
Khmara framed the task in plain terms.
“We must adapt faster and give our warriors modern and effective tools,” he stressed, calling it the shared job of the Defense Ministry, the commander-in-chief and the General Staff.
Login