Russia pounds Kyiv with missiles and drones after Putin orders retaliation

Kyiv was jolted awake by a massive Russian barrage shortly after 1 a.m. local time, with missiles and drones slamming into residential buildings and schools and sending the city center shaking near government offices. At least one person was killed and at least 10 others were injured as damage spread across multiple districts, including Shevchenkivskyi, Dniprovskyi and Podilskyi.

The overnight assault followed Vladimir Putin’s order to prepare retaliation after a drone strike on a student dormitory in Russian-controlled Luhansk. Ukraine’s military denied targeting civilians there and said its forces had hit a Russian drone command unit instead, underscoring the tit-for-tat logic driving the latest exchange. Hours before the Kyiv attack, U.S. and Ukrainian authorities had warned that a Russian strike could be imminent.

Ukraine’s Air Force also warned that Russia might use an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile, a weapon Moscow has already fired twice before. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has previously said such use would set a dangerous precedent for other would-be aggressors, and the warning added to the sense that Russia was escalating its arsenal as well as its tempo.

The damage in Kyiv was not confined to one neighborhood. City officials reported impact sites across the capital, and some accounts said debris burned at a school in the city center. The blast wave was strong enough to rattle buildings near the government quarter, a reminder that even heavily defended parts of the capital remain exposed when Russia launches large, coordinated raids.

The strike also fit a broader pattern that has intensified through May. Earlier in the month, Russia carried out one of the heaviest aerial attacks of the war on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, firing hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles. The scale of the bombardment has stretched air defenses, forced repeated civilian sheltering and kept pressure on crews racing to clear wreckage and assess fresh damage before dawn.

For Kyiv, the latest attack was not an isolated hit but another step in an escalating campaign in which Moscow is pairing retaliation claims with increasingly punishing overnight strikes. The result is visible in shattered windows, damaged schools and neighborhoods forced to absorb the cost of a wider war of reprisals.