Charred walls, splintered floors: Inside Ukraine’s government headquarters after a devastating Russian attack
An inside view at a headquarters of Ukraine's government that was hit by a Russian Iskander missile overnight on Sept. 7 in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sept. 8, 2025. (Danylo Antoniuk/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The smell of smoke grew stronger as you approached Ukraine's main government building.
A day prior, Russian forces hit the Cabinet of Ministers with an Iskander missile, damaging the headquarters of the country's executive authority, engulfing its upper floors in flame.
"The fire spread quickly," said Andrii Danyk, head of Ukraine's State Emergency Service, standing in front of the building's scorched walls.
The 5-meter-wide hole in what used to be the wall overlooked a roughly 3-meter-wide hole in what used to be a floor in a spacious cabinet home to one of the government departments.
From the inside, a picturesque view of Kyiv's downtown sharply contrasted with the wreckage within the building. Over a day after the attack, efforts to clear the rubble inside the Cabinet of Ministers continued without pause.
Overnight on Sept. 7, Russia attacked Ukraine with a record number of aerial weapons — 810 drones and 13 missiles, targeting settlements all across Ukraine. The attack killed three people, including a woman and her two-month-old child, and injured 20 others in Kyiv.
Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko described the recent mass attack as "a new stage of this war."
"This is not the conduct of a country seeking peace," Svyrydenko said. "It is a direct mockery of every diplomatic effort made by the civilized world."
Katarina Mathernova, EU ambassador to Ukraine, said that the entire building "was not reduced to rubble" only thanks to the missile failing to detonate.
According to Defense Express, a Kyiv-based defense consulting agency, the fire was caused by fuel leakage from the missile's tanks.
The building contained a lot of wooden structures, which complicated the extinguishing, Danyk said. The Cabinet of Ministers was also the seventh site hit by Russia that night in Kyiv, so emergency crews were thinly spread across all sites.
The Cabinet is located in the government quarter in central Kyiv, home to several key administrative buildings, including the Presidential Office, which lies some 500 meters (0.5 miles) away. This area of the capital is rarely targeted, but it has come under increased threat as Russia has intensified its drone attacks, with drones now reaching this district.
"The evidence of this existential battle is right in front of us: (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is deliberately targeting the country's lifelines — its government, its energy, its people," Mathernova said.
The broader pattern
Russia has targeted administrative buildings since the beginning of its full-scale invasion.
As of November 2024, Russian aggression had damaged or destroyed 883 administrative buildings, causing an estimated $0.8 billion in direct losses, according to the Kyiv School of Economics.
Two of the deadliest such attacks stand out.
On March 1, 2022, Russia launched two missiles on the Kharkiv Regional State Administration, killing 44 people. Later that same month, an attack on the Mykolaiv Regional Military Administration killed over 30 people and injured more than 30 others.
This June, Russia partially destroyed the regional administrative building in Kherson in a double airstrike. In recent months, Russia has also consistently targeted the Sumy Regional Military Administration.
Zera Kozlyieva, the legal director of the Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian non-profit organization that documents and investigates war crimes, said that administrative buildings are considered civilian objects by default. Deliberate attacks on them are prohibited under international humanitarian law and may qualify as war crimes.
"Potentially, the attack on the government building on Sept. 7 could be classified as a war crime," Kozlyieva told the Kyiv Independent.
According to Article 52 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, "civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives."
Under this Protocol, military targets are objects that, by their nature, location, purpose, or use, contribute to military action and whose destruction offers a clear military advantage.
Even if an administrative building were used for military purposes — like storing weapons or housing a command center — it could become a lawful target only if its destruction provided a real military benefit at that time, Kozlyieva said.
Still, the principle of proportionality applies, she added. Attacks causing excessive civilian harm or damage to civilian objects compared to the expected military gain are prohibited and may qualify as war crimes.
Note from the author:
Hello there! This is Kateryna Denisova, the author of this piece.
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