The Russian army failed to hit any military targets in the city of kyiv, but it did achieve its objective: to administer another poisonous dose of terror to the civilian population. And they are growing. Vladimir Putin, who is personally directing the war, launched a bloody blitz on the Ukrainian capital and some of its cities. When the missile smoke cleared, rescue services counted 19 dead, four of them children, and dozens wounded.
A total of 563 Shahed drones, one X-47 cruise missile, seven Iskander and KN23 ballistic missiles from North Korea, and 18 X-101 missiles crossed the skies of Ukraine from Russian territory. Although many were shot down in flight, 629 aerial targets are too many for any anti-aircraft system, a strategy of saturating defenses that unfortunately makes a certain amount of sense. Moscow now manufactures 500 Shahed drones every 24 hours. The goal is to produce 1,000 by the end of the year, so that the attacks will become increasingly deadly. It is a deadly cheap weapon (20,000 euros) but lethal, emitting an engine sound that can be heard throughout the city and terrifying people trying to sleep.
"Russia prefers ballistics to the negotiating table. It chooses to continue killing instead of ending the war. And it's definitely time to impose new and tough sanctions against Russia for everything it's doing," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said there were around 50 injured, 40 of whom were hospitalized. The attacks damaged residential buildings in several districts of the capital, as well as a shopping center, a kindergarten, and the offices of the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper. A Shahed drone also hit an Intercity passenger train traveling from Kyiv to Kharkiv.
The attack also "deliberately" targeted the European Union delegation in Kiev, according to European Council President António Costa. He said he was"horrified" by the new wave of attacks and asserted that "the EU will not be intimidated. Russian aggression only strengthens our resolve to stand with Ukraine and its people." The EU building was hit by a missile. Russia has many Soviet-era missiles with very low accuracy, but the Iskander is not the case. If it hit that diplomatic building, that was the Kremlin's objective.
Ursula von der Leyen wrote in her X profile:"Putin must sit at the negotiating table. We must ensure a just and lasting peace for Ukraine with firm and credible security guarantees that turn the country into a steel hedgehog. Europe will play its full role." Gabrielius Landsbergis, former foreign minister of Lithuania, was highly critical of this European stance:"Putin will smile at today's EU announcements emphasizing negotiations. He will interpret this as our definitive abandonment of the goal of battlefield victory for Ukraine. We should tell the terrorists that they won. This is not just worrying, it is devastating."
During the night attack, NATO fighter-bombers took off and patrolled the skies over the nearby border with Poland. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov asserted, with his usual cynicism:"Russia is successfully striking military and military-related infrastructure. At the same time, Russia remains interested in continuing the negotiation process to achieve our goals through political and diplomatic means."
Strategy
Other missiles fell on residential buildings, something that happens daily. Is it really efficient for Russia to use multi-million-dollar missiles to attack targets with no strategic value? It must be, given their punishment mentality, because they've been practicing it since the beginning of the invasion. The Ukrainian tactic, which has targeted Russia's war economy, destroys refineries and weapons factories, but Russia has set its sights on people.
For its part, Ukraine has hit two more refineries : the Samara refinery, more than 1,000 kilometers from Ukraine, and the Afipsky refinery, 380 kilometers away, worsening the fuel crisis already affecting some Russian regions. There is no more effective sanction than Ukraine's Liuty drones.
Given Vladimir Putin's failure at the front, where the summer offensive has once again failed to capture its minimum objectives (Pokrovsk, Kupiansk, Konstiantinivka, etc.), long-distance revenge always comes. It's a pattern that has been repeated since the first days of the invasion. Now, he also has a US president who is more interested in his relationship with the Kremlin than in the fate of the Ukrainians.
But something has changed in recent months. Before, Moscow was blamed for the massacre, but now the White House is also being looked at. Trump's move has cleared a leader wanted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. With his submissive attitude, allowing himself to be skillfully massaged by the autocrat, Trump has managed to get Russia to double the number of nighttime attacks on Ukrainian cities during the Biden era, which Trump claims was the weak president.
An ABC News analysis finds that the intensity of Russian long-range drone attacks increased by around 44% in the week following Trump's election victory. According to the UN, the first five months of 2025 saw a 50% increase in civilian casualties from Russian attacks on infrastructure compared to the same period the previous year. In April and May, the number of casualties from attacks was very high: 1,389 victims (221 dead) in April and 1,019 (183 dead) in May.
Vladimir Putin, the man US President Donald Trump claims wants peace, continues to give tangible evidence to the contrary. No one in Ukraine trusted him, but now neither does Trump, who is determined to pursue negotiations that he rejects every week. The Kremlin has the blond tycoon's measure, and he seems beguiled by the Russian autocrat, with whom he boasts on every occasion of having a close relationship. This was evident on the red carpet in Alaska, where Trump greeted Putin with applause. It is exactly the support Putin needs to roll out his bloody red carpet for the cities of Ukraine.
Putin feels unpunished with an appeasing Trump, but also with an ineffective Europe whose building in kyiv has blown up. All the efforts of his leaders seem to work for a few days, when Donald Trump threatens Russia with sanctions. But as soon as he speaks to the Russian again on the red phone, the eternal two-week ultimatum, which is never met, returns. We have now gone seven weeks since February without the Kremlin receiving any kind of consequence in the form of sanctions or tariffs, something that all its old allies have suffered. Yesterday, Emmanuel Macron (France), Friedrich Merz (Germany), and Donald Tusk (Poland) gave speeches in Moldova about freedom and their commitment to the nations attacked by Russia.
