Russia launched one of its largest overnight attacks of the autumn against Kyiv, firing 36 ballistic missiles, all of them aimed at the capital and the surrounding region, alongside 172 attack drones over Kyiv and 12 other regions, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s Air Force. Ukrainian air defences intercepted 149 of the drones and four missiles, with impacts recorded at 24 locations. Ukrainian authorities reported two people killed and 37 injured across Ukraine over the past day, with at least six injured in Kyiv itself, including a child among the wounded in the capital region.
The strategic target was the power grid. Ukraine’s energy ministry said the attacks damaged the transmission networks carrying electricity from the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plants to Kyiv, the capital region and central Ukraine, and that extensive damage to energy facilities in and around the capital had severely disrupted transmission, with repairs expected to take time. Substations were also damaged in the Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Kharkiv and Dnipro oblasts, Zelenskyy said. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, described the city’s energy supply situation as extremely difficult, with heating and water affected; emergency power cuts were introduced in the capital at 7:05 a.m., replacing the scheduled outage timetables, and hourly outage schedules and industrial capacity limits remained in force in most regions.
In the capital, the strikes damaged the Northern Bridge across the Dnipro River, closing it in both directions after its road surface, trolleybus power lines and electrical infrastructure were hit, and damaged residential buildings in the Solomianskyi district, where part of a five-storey apartment block’s facade was destroyed and a two-storey building on kindergarten grounds was wrecked.
Russia’s defence ministry gave its own account, confirming that it targeted a bridge, a power plant, a substation and a facility producing ammunition and explosives in the Kyiv region, and a substation in Zhytomyr. The two sides’ accounts differ on targets, as they routinely do; what is not in dispute is the scale of the damage to the power infrastructure around the capital.
The nuclear link is what lifts this attack beyond the now familiar pattern of grid strikes. International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi has said the substations serving nuclear plants are vital for nuclear safety and security, because the plants rely on them for the external power their safety and cooling systems need, and that such substations must not be targeted. Both Rivne and Khmelnytskyi had already been forced to restrict output in recent days because of earlier damage to the grid around them.
The timing is diplomatic as well as military. Negotiators from Russia, Ukraine and the United States are scheduled to meet on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi for talks aimed at ending the war, the Associated Press reported. Zelenskyy framed the attack in those terms, saying Russia was preparing for trilateral talks by launching ballistic missiles at Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, and that a country trying to plunge a capital of millions into blackout must not leave Ukraine without support. Whether Kyiv’s power can be stabilised before Tuesday, and whether the substation damage forces further nuclear output cuts, are the two measures of this attack that will still matter when the talks open.