Russia Intensifies Air War in Ukraine

Everyone agrees: it’s getting worse. The people of Kyiv have, like the citizens of other Ukrainian cities, been through a lot. After three and a half years of fluctuating fortunes, they are tough and extremely resilient. But in recent months, they have been experiencing something new: vast, coordinated waves of attacks from the air, involving hundreds of drones and missiles, often concentrated on a single city.

Last night, it was Kyiv. And the week before too. In between, it was Lutsk in the far west. Three years ago, Iranian-supplied Shahed drones were a relative novelty. I remember hearing my first, buzzing a lazy arc across the night sky above the southern city of Zaporizhzhia in October 2022. But now everyone is familiar with the sound, and its most fearsome recent iteration: a dive-bombing wail some have compared to the German World War Two Stuka aircraft.

The sound of swarms of approaching drones have sent hardened civilians back to bomb shelters, the metro and underground car parks for the first time since the early days of the war.

“The house shook like it was made of paper,” Katya, a Kyiv resident, told me after last night’s heavy bombardment.

“We spent the entire night sitting in the bathroom.”

“I went to the parking for the first time,” another resident, Svitlana, told me.

“The building shook and I could see fires across the river.”

The attacks don’t always claim lives, but they are spreading fear and eroding morale.

After an attack on a residential block in Kyiv last week, a shocked grandmother, Mariia, told me that her 11-year old grandson had turned to her, in the shelter, and said he understood the meaning of death for the first time.

He has every reason to be fearful. The UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) says June saw the highest monthly civilian casualties in three years, with 232 people killed and over 1,300 injured. Many will have been killed or wounded in communities close to the front lines, but others have been killed in cities far from the fighting.

“The surge in long-range missile and drone strikes across the country has brought even more death and destruction to civilians far away from the frontline,” says Danielle Bell, head of HRMMU.