Russia launched a blistering ballistic missile attack on Kyiv and its suburbs before dawn on Wednesday, killing at least 17 people and wounding dozens more, Ukrainian officials said, as Moscow takes advantage of Kyiv’s depleted air defenses.
The attack set off large blazes that filled the skies with smoke as rescue workers raced to find survivors in the rubble of a city that is now largely defenseless against ballistic missile strikes.
It was the third major attack on the capital in a week as Ukraine runs desperately low on interceptor missiles for its Patriot batteries, the only reliable defense against Russia’s most sophisticated missiles.
“Ballistic missile interceptors could have saved the lives of those killed today,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a statement, putting the initial death toll at 17. “It is very important that our partners understand that delays in supplying them, or an unwillingness to provide antiballistic systems, lead directly to such horrific casualties and destruction.”
The shortage of interceptors has become a wider problem as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East drain military stockpiles around the world. Late last month, President Trump put aside plans to escalate attacks on Iran after advisers raised concerns about the dwindling American supplies of Patriot systems and other antimissile munitions.
Mr. Trump appeared to have provided Ukraine with an alternate path toward improving air defenses when he said last month that the United States would share the technology for producing Patriot missiles with Kyiv. But later he backed off that promise, saying, “We have not agreed to that.”
Ukraine is working to develop its own version of the Patriot system, but the country cannot currently make an air-defense system as effective.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that they had not intercepted any of the 24 ballistic missiles and four hypersonic missiles that Russia used in the attack on Wednesday. The air force added that, although it had shot down 98 drones, 17 strikes were recorded.
The missiles on Wednesday struck in a matter of minutes, leaving little time for civilians to seek shelter.
Serhii Mehei, 32, said that he had seen people running for shelter as the missiles struck the district where he lives in Kyiv.
“You only have about two to five minutes to get to shelter, and not everyone can get downstairs that quickly,” he said.
Like many Ukrainians, he said that he knows the difference between the sounds of air defenses intercepting missiles and direct hits. All he heard during the latest attack, he said, were the thunderous explosions of direct impacts.
“I saw the windows shaking, even the frames were rattling,” he said. “It was the first time I’d ever felt the walls actually shaking. You start thinking that at any moment the building could collapse.”
Mr. Zelensky said that the main targets of the attack had been warehouse facilities belonging to civilian businesses. Those included a train depot, a brewing company, construction materials warehouses and civilian logistics facilities, he said.
At least eight people were killed at a train facility in a Kyiv suburb, local officials said.
Six employees of the Silpo supermarket chain were killed after two distribution centers were hit, the company said in a statement. And three were killed at a sorting center for Nova Poshta, a postal and delivery company, that was destroyed in the attack, according to officials. The largest distribution center for Ukraine’s main online retailer, Rozetka, was hit by three missiles. The center processed more than 100,000 orders a day and is now beyond repair, the company said.
The company’s co-founder Iryna Chechotkina wrote on social media, “Today, I was supposed to post about Rozetka turning 21.”
“Instead,” she added, “at night I watched as my life’s work burned down after three ballistic missiles hit.”
Photos and videos captured by Ukrainian news media of dead bodies scattered across a railway platform in the village of Kvitneve, on the outskirts of Kyiv, suggested that some of the victims had been waiting for a train when the station was struck.
“Early reports indicate that bodies have been discovered on the railway platform near the logistics centers that came under attack,” the national railway operator, Ukrzaliznytsia, said in a statement.
Ukraine continued to target facilities in Russia belonging to Wildberries, the country’s largest online retailer, including an overnight attack directed at a warehouse in Tula, about 200 miles from the border.
Also, the head of one of Russia’s domestic drone manufacturers was critically wounded by a car bomb on Tuesday, according to the Russian daily Kommersant.
The head of the manufacturer, Vladimir Tkachuk, was in intensive care, the news agency TASS reported. The attack killed the driver of his Mercedes.
Valerie Hopkins, Nataliia Novosolova, Stanislav Kozliuk and Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting.
