Zelenskyy pleads for Patriot interceptors after deadly Russian strikes on Ukraine

Russian air strikes have killed 16 people and wounded more than 40 in Kiev and the surrounding region, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a failure by Ukraine’s allies to replenish its stock of air defence missiles was costing lives.

Zelenskyy called Thursday’s strikes one of the most “cynical, calculated, and large-scale” of the four-and-a-half-year-long war.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched dozens of cruise missiles, as well as ballistic and hypersonic ones, and 168 drones, in the massive overnight attack.

The air force said that nearly 90 percent of the drones and most of the cruise missiles were downed. It did not specify how many ballistic missiles were launched and whether any were intercepted.

The upper floors of a nine-storey residential block were destroyed in Kiev’s Solomianskyi district, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

He called for Friday to be observed as a day of mourning.

Overall, 30 residential buildings, a school, a children’s hospital, and a kindergarten were damaged in the capital and the surrounding areas, Zelenskyy said.

Private energy company DTEK said it had restored power to some 90,000 households that lost the supply after the attack.

The Russian defence ministry said Moscow attacked Kiev and the surrounding region with air strikes and drones, hitting facilities producing drone components, a military depot and a logistics hub, as well as other targets.

Patriot interceptors