Meridian World Desk
A Russian drone struck a school in Kyiv on Thursday while children and staff sheltered inside, Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said. The warhead did not explode, and no one was hurt.
The strike landed a day after Russia carried out its largest coordinated attack on Ukraine’s power grid since the end of last winter’s heating season, battering the capital and the surrounding region with drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in a day-long assault that killed several people, including a child, and wounded others. Two Russian drones also hit a bridge linking eastern and western Kyiv on Thursday, suspending metro and ground transport across the city.
For residents who have endured more than four years of war, the past two days have added a new layer of dread to lives already shaped by sirens and blackouts. Maryna Lystopad, a 35-year-old Kyiv resident, described the toll of the repeated air raid alerts and strikes on the city’s nerves — a population forced night after night into corridors, basements and metro platforms, uncertain whether the next warning will pass harmlessly or end in rubble. Families have taken to sending children to school or to shelters not knowing whether either will be struck before the day is out.
The school hit on Thursday was damaged in the attack, though officials said the building remained standing and the drone’s failure to detonate spared it from the kind of destruction that has levelled other structures in the city. The episode nonetheless underscored how close Kyiv’s youngest residents have come, repeatedly, to mass casualties simply by being where they are supposed to be — in classrooms, in shelters, at their desks.
Grid under renewed assault
Wednesday’s attack on the power grid forced Ukrenergo, the state grid operator, to impose outages in Kyiv and the wider Kyiv Oblast and to urge residents to curb electricity use as engineers raced to assess the damage. The Trypilska Thermal Power Plant, run by state-owned Centrenergo in Kyiv Oblast, was among the facilities hit. A Russian drone also struck the grounds of a nuclear research facility in Kyiv, sparking a fire that was quickly extinguished; Ukraine’s nuclear safety watchdog said there were no injuries and that the shut-down test reactor was undamaged.
The attack formed part of a broader escalation: Ukraine’s air force has recorded a rise in Russian drone attacks through September compared with August, a trend officials link to Moscow’s push to grind down the country’s defences and its population’s endurance before winter sets in, when heat and electricity become matters of survival.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy convened officials on Thursday to discuss protecting critical infrastructure and ordered a review of agreements governing the supply of air-defence systems. He also said Ukrainian forces had struck a drone storage and launch site in Russia’s Oryol region, and said on social media that Ukraine had used its domestically developed FP-7 short-range ballistic missile in combat for the first time — a claim that has not been independently verified.
Interceptors running short
The bombardment has intensified concern over Ukraine’s dwindling stock of Patriot interceptors, the mainstay of its defence against ballistic missiles, which Western allies have struggled to replenish at the pace Russian strikes demand. Ukrainian officials have warned that the shortage leaves cities and infrastructure more exposed precisely as Moscow has widened its use of ballistic weapons alongside drones.
Speaking separately at the Valdai Club forum, President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries had cost Russia roughly 1% of its gross domestic product — a rare public admission of the economic toll Kyiv’s own long-range campaign has inflicted.
Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced a fresh package of sanctions on Thursday targeting 31 Russian individuals, entities and ships, citing their roles in the detention and torture of Ukrainians and the militarisation of Ukrainian children. The measures add to a widening web of Western penalties aimed at pressuring Moscow as the war grinds through its fifth winter, with no sign that the aerial campaign against Ukraine’s cities and power supply is slowing.