A large-scale Russian drone assault struck Ukraine on Wednesday, killing six people and wounding dozens, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. The strikes came soon after a temporary ceasefire between the two sides ended.
Zelenskyy described the attack as among the longest and largest of the war. He wrote on X that “since midnight, at least 800 Russian drones have already been launched,” and that the barrage was continuing as additional drones entered Ukrainian airspace. He said the daytime strikes deliberately targeted railway infrastructure and civilian sites.
The president said the assault began in midmorning and continued for hours, hitting Kyiv, the western city of Lviv and the port of Odesa. Attacks also struck residential areas and railway infrastructure in the central Dnipro and northeastern Kharkiv regions, and damaged energy facilities in central Poltava.
As a precaution, the Polish military scrambled fighter jets in response to the strikes. Slovakia briefly closed its border with Ukraine for security reasons after a nearby Ukrainian city came under attack.
Russia has denied deliberately targeting civilians, a claim at odds with the thousands of civilian casualties reported since the conflict began.
The barrage coincided with US President Donald Trump’s arrival in China for a high-profile state visit to meet President Xi Jinping. Zelenskyy condemned the timing, saying it could not be dismissed as a coincidence and accusing Moscow of trying to cast a shadow over the geopolitical moment by drawing attention away from other global events. He urged continued international attention and support for Ukraine, warning that reduced focus on the war only encourages further escalation.
Earlier on Tuesday, before the strikes, Trump told reporters he believed a deal between Moscow and Kyiv to end the fighting could be imminent, saying, “The end of the war in Ukraine I really think is getting very close.”
Ukrainian officials said the raid illustrated an evolving Russian approach to drone warfare. Serhiy Beskrestnov, an adviser to the defense minister, said the attack involved large numbers of drones moving along corridors 5 to 10 kilometers from the Belarus border, a tactic intended to overwhelm air defenses and push into western regions. He noted that Moscow’s drone tactics have changed from strike to strike.
Ukraine said it will send experts to Latvia to help design a multi-layered air-defense system capable of countering different types of threats. That move follows an incident in which two reportedly stray Ukrainian drones struck infrastructure in Latvia after crossing from Russia; Kyiv blamed the mishap on Russian electronic warfare. Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina said anti-drone systems had not been deployed quickly enough.
Moscow maintains that strikes on civilian infrastructure can be legitimate if they are intended to weaken Ukraine’s military capability, a position rejected by Kyiv and many Western governments. The situation remains fluid as Ukrainian authorities continue to assess damage and casualties and work to bolster air defenses against further attacks.