.jpg)
An air raid alert was in place over the Kyiv region early on Sunday, with the local military administration saying Russia was attacking with drones and missiles.
The head of Kyiv’s military administration, Tymur Tkachenko, said early findings had identified three deaths, which were swiftly updated after another body was found.
Tkachenko wrote on the Telegram messaging app that more than 15 locations had been damaged due to the barrage of attacks, including “drone strikes on multi-storey residential buildings”.
“The consequences of the attack are already known in the Darnytskyi, Sviatoshynskyi, Solomianskyi, Holosiivskyi, and Dniprovskyi districts. Some locations include car fires in courtyards,” he added.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the strikes “brutal” that lasted “over 12 hours”.
“Nearly 500 strike drones and more than 40 missiles, including ‘Kinzhal’. In the morning, Russian-Iranian ‘Shaheds’ were again in our sky,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram.
“Moscow wants to continue fighting and killing and deserves only the harshest pressure from the world … We will continue to strike back to deprive Russia of these opportunities to earn and force it to diplomacy … The time for decisive action has long come, and we count on a strong reaction from the US, Europe, the G7, and the G20,” he added.
Some Kyiv residents fled to metro stations deep underground for safety as the attack continued in the morning.
Many regions across the country were also under air raid alert, while neighbouring Poland closed airspace near two of its southeastern cities and its air force and allied forces scrambled jets in response.
In a statement posted on X, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Russia had fired “hundreds of drones and missiles” overnight.
He said the strikes destroyed residential buildings and caused “civilian casualties”.
“We must maximise the cost of further escalation for Russia,” he said.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the Ukrainian capital was under a “massive” assault and urged people to stay in shelters.“In total, there are five injured,” Klitschko said on Telegram, adding that they had been hospitalised.
In a later update, Kitschko said 14 people had now been injured, with one in serious condition.
Emergency workers operate at an impact site in a residential neighbourhood after Russian drone and missile attacks in Kyiv, Ukraine, September 28, 2025. REUTERS/Thomas Peter TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Emergency workers operate at a site in a neighbourhood after Russian attacks in Kyiv on Sunday [Thomas Peter/Reuters]
Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s Malcolm Webb said “dozens” of apartments were damaged by Russia’s attack that killed a young girl.
“Just a short while ago, we found a school teacher walking along this path, trying to find out if it was her student who was killed. There’ll be an empty desk in a classroom this morning,” he said.
“We also spoke to another mother from an apartment here whose 12-year-old son was borrowing her phone; he wanted to find out if it was his friend who had been killed or not,” Webb added.
An independent monitor described the attack on Kyiv as one of the biggest on the capital and the surrounding areas since the full-scale war began.
The Kyiv Post reported that the total number of aerial targets is still being assessed, but described the latest Russian attack as “one of the heaviest they had ever witnessed”.
Anti-aircraft fire rang out through the night as drones flew over Kyiv.In the southeastern Zaporizhia region, the governor said Russian strikes there had wounded at least four people.
“Once again, residential buildings and infrastructure are being hit. Once again, it is a war against civilians,” Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said.
“There will be a response to these actions. But the West’s economic blows against Russia must also be stronger,” Yermak said.