Daytime drone attacks on Kyiv kill seven, including a 14-year-old boy

What happened

On September 25, Russia attacked Kyiv with strike drones several times over the course of the day. According to Mayor Vitali Klitschko, seven people were killed and 59 injured. Twenty-five of the injured are in city hospitals, one in serious condition. The mayor said two children are among the injured.

Morning: a strike on a residential tower

In the morning a Russian drone hit a 16-storey residential building in Kyiv’s Pecherskyi district. A 14-year-old boy was killed and at least seven people were injured, Kyiv police said. AFP journalists at the scene saw charred apartments on the ninth and tenth floors.

Israel’s foreign ministry later said the boy was an Israeli citizen and that his mother was among the wounded. Israel condemned the Russian attacks on Kyiv and offered condolences to the families of all those killed.

President Volodymyr Zelensky called the strike “absolutely savage and sickening” and “devoid of any military logic”. He said eight regions had come under attack that morning: in Odesa, one person was killed in a double-tap strike on a postal facility; in Zaporizhzhia, a medical clinic was hit while people were inside; and people were injured in the Sumy and Mykolaiv regions.

Afternoon: an office block and a court building

Later that day, the building of Ukraine’s High Council of Justice was damaged. Six people were injured according to preliminary information, and the institution suspended its work.

In the afternoon, a drone struck an office building in Solomianskyi district. Police said four people were killed: two outside the building, one inside and one in a car in the parking lot. At least ten were injured, including a 17-year-old boy, and cars caught fire in the car park. Hromadske reports that the Air Force had warned at around 2:30 p.m. of jet-powered drones heading for Kyiv. Telecoms company DataGroup said its data centre was damaged, with no staff hurt and services running from backup facilities.

In the evening, according to Klitschko’s preliminary information, a drone fell onto a two-storey preschool building in Obolonskyi district, starting a fire. In Vyshhorod district of the Kyiv region, Russian forces hit a lyceum, which also caught fire.

The scale of the attack

Ukraine’s Air Force said that between 07:00 and 18:30 alone, Russia launched 162 strike drones at Ukraine, 76 of them jet-powered. Air defence shot down or suppressed 127, including 44 jet drones. Hits were recorded at 27 locations, and debris from downed drones fell at four more. As of 20:00, several attack drones were still in Ukrainian airspace.

Why it matters

AFP highlights a shift in tactics. Russia used to strike Kyiv mainly at night, but now increasingly attacks in broad daylight with jet-powered drones that have managed to bypass some Ukrainian interception systems. When blasts rang out again in the early afternoon, some people ran for shelter while others walked on without reacting, the agency’s journalists observed. “This is a technological race and a technological war,” one resident of the damaged building told the agency.

What next

Zelensky said Ukraine had warned partners that Russia will only escalate its strikes as winter approaches unless pressure is applied. “For diplomacy to work, U.S. sanctions must be implemented and European sanctions must be strengthened,” he said. That evening the president also announced that Ukraine is speeding up production of interceptors against jet-powered Shahed drones.