Kyiv said Russia unleashed its largest drone attack since 2022 in the early hours of Monday morning as President Vladimir Putin shows no sign of scaling back his all-out war on Ukraine.
Kremlin forces fired almost 500 drones at Ukraine and more than a dozen missiles, in a major attack targeting cities across the country, according to Ukrainian authorities.
Ukraine said its air defenses had shot down hundreds of drones and many missiles, and claimed that injuries were minimal.
“Russia is escalating the war and has no intention of stopping it,” said Andriy Yermak, top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “Any escalation can only be stopped by force.”
Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 and has shown no signs of abating, even amid a staggering death toll, glacially slow advances in the country’s east and efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump’s team to bring an end to the conflict.
Despite two rounds of talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Turkey in recent weeks, Putin’s military has only ramped up its aerial bombardment — regularly firing record-setting numbers of drones at Ukraine.
Kyiv, for its part, has fought back with a daring drone strike of its own, crippling Putin’s fleet of strategic bombers with a recent AI-supported attack thousands of kilometers inside Russia.