Russian missile and drone barrage in Ukrainian capital region kills 17

Kyiv: Russian missile and drone strikes on Kyiv and the surrounding region killed 17 people and wounded 44 others overnight into Wednesday, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

The attack was the latest in a series of large-scale Russian ballistic missile strikes that have become near-routine this summer. The intensified barrages are exploiting Ukraine's critical shortage of interceptor missiles for the US-made Patriot systems, the sole air defence system in its arsenal able to shoot down ballistic missiles. Zelenskyy has pleaded with other countries to send more of the ammunition made scarcer by the Iran war.

“Ballistic interceptors are what could have saved the lives of those killed today,” Zelenskyy said on social media. “It is very important for our partners to understand that delays in supplying them, or a reluctance to hand over anti-ballistic systems, lead directly to such horrific casualties and destruction.”


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Large warehouse fires burned in the city of Brovary and the villages of Velyka Dymerka, Kvitneve and Peremoha. A fire involving vehicles at an enterprise in Fastiv district was extinguished.

In Bucha district, crews battled a warehouse fire in the village of Chaiky after putting out a separate fire at a logistics facility in Sofiivska Borshchahivka.

In the capital, one person was killed and 15 were wounded, and emergency crews extinguished all fires sparked by the strikes in the Obolonskyi, Sviatoshynskyi, Holosiivskyi and Desnianskyi districts, the Kyiv City Military Administration said.

Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine's president on defence technology development, said the war of attrition has entered a new phase. "The enemy is attacking everything indiscriminately - retail warehouses, food storage facilities, logistics hubs, enterprises, building materials warehouses," he said on Facebook.

One of the companies that came under heavy fire was Epicentr, one of Ukraine's largest retail and construction chains. It said in a statement on Facebook that "in minutes, Russian missiles destroyed what the company had built over decades." One employee was killed, and three others were wounded. Russia hit two of the company's key logistics hubs.

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A direct hit also destroyed the production floor of its ceramic tile factory, forcing the company to halt manufacturing there and shift production abroad, with full recovery expected to take up to two years, the company said.

Epicentr also voiced support for other Ukrainian businesses damaged in the attack, saying it understood "how many years of work, effort, faith and daily responsibility stand behind every enterprise."

Ukraine has carried out its own campaign against Russian retail logistics, striking multiple warehouses belonging to Wildberries - often described as Russia's answer to Amazon - as part of a broader effort to damage Moscow's economy and confront Russians with the costs of the war.