'It was horrifying, like an earthquake' – Kyiv recovering from mass Russian attack that left 2 killed, 32 injured, ahead of peace talks
Editor's note: This is a developing story. It's being updated as more details come in.
Kyiv came under a mass combined missile and drone attack overnight on Dec. 27.
The attack started with Russia launching several Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, Iskander ballistic missiles, and a group of Kalibr cruise missiles at the capital shortly before 2 a.m. Kyiv time, monitoring channels reported.
Drones kept attacking the capital throughout the night. The air raid alert lasted for nearly 10 hours, and was only turned off after 11 a.m. on Dec. 27.
Another wave came at noon, with drones targeting Kyiv for an hour, until it was all clear again at 1:30 p.m.
"When it seemed that the terrible night was over, we woke up to a terrifying explosion at eight in the morning," Tetiana Donets, a Kyiv resident, told the Kyiv Independent.
"We didn't understand what had happened and only later saw in the news that a missile had hit the fourth floor of the neighboring building. The whole street is covered with debris and glass. It's been emotionally difficult."
As she was still recovering from the news of the close hit, Donets learned that the attack shattered the windows in her office in another part of Kyiv, and had to head there to clean it up.
Drones and falling debris slammed into apartment blocks across the city, igniting fires that spread floor by floor. In one 18-story building in the city's Dniprovskyi district, a person is believed to be trapped under the rubble on the fifth floor, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
At least 32 people were injured in Kyiv during the attack, including two children, according to the latest update shared by the Kyiv Police Force. An elderly man was killed in the city's Dniprovskyi district, while his wife is in critical condition at the hospital.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said that at least one other person was killed in the town of Bila Tserka, Kyiv Oblast. As of noon, he said, firefighters and first responders were still working on five locations in Kyiv.
The attack cut off heat to a third of the capital, including 4,000 residential buildings, Klitschko added. Engineers are working to restore power. Some households lost water supply, too.
Russian drones also struck a gas production facility and a combined heat and power plant belonging to Naftogaz, Ukraine's state-owned oil and gas giant, the company reported.
"It is clear that these attacks are synchronized with the drop in temperatures. The enemy is trying to exploit freezing weather and peak demand in order to disable the system," Naftogaz's CEO Serhii Koretskyi said.
Ongoing energy outages have become routine for the capital in the past two months, following Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. Households are left without electricity for up to 15 hours per day.
Polish military aircraft were mobilized overnight in response to Russia’s large-scale attack on Ukraine, Poland’s Armed Forces reported on X.
Several explosions were heard across the capital, according to Kyiv Independent reporters on the ground, as well as in Kyiv Oblast, where power outages were reported in the town of Brovary and surrounding areas following the strikes. Brovary is located 20 kilometers (around 12 miles) northeast of Kyiv.
A fire was reported in the city’s Holosiivskyi district in southwestern Kyiv, while debris fell in the Obolonskyi (northern Kyiv) and Desnianskyi (eastern Kyiv) districts.
Closer to the end of the attack, an apartment building was hit in the northwestern part of Kyiv in Shevchenkivsky District, on Oleny Telihy Street.
Liubov Chernenko, 73, has lived in the building on Telihy Street her whole life. On the early afternoon of Dec. 27, she was standing outside it, waiting as first responders were working on the site. Her third floor apartment was damaged and will need repairs. The woman said she can hardly walk and relies on her son to take care of her.
"My kitchen window was knocked out, the doors in one room as well," Chernenko told the Kyiv Independent. "The other rooms are fine, just full of smoke and dust. My neighbor on the fourth floor said her balcony was completely gone. My balcony is damaged too, but I can’t get there to check it."
She said the building was hit at 10:30 a.m. that day. She had just taken her medicine and was in bed.
"I didn’t even see or hear the explosion," the woman said. "Things just started flying all around me. It was horrifying, felt like an earthquake."
"They were bombing us all night," she added. "I heard explosions all night. Most seemed far away, but I still barely slept."
In Vyshhorod, some five kilometers (nine miles) north of Kyiv, several windows were damaged in a high-rise building, while in Kyiv Oblast’s Boryspil district an unspecified number of warehouses, as well as two cars, were damaged, Kyiv Oblast Governor Mykola Kalashnyk said, adding that critical infrastructure was once again under attack.
Separately, one person was injured in the attack in western Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast and was taken to a hospital, according to Kalashnyk.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Air Force warned of an ongoing Russian drone and missile threat across multiple regions.
The latest attack comes as President Volodymyr Zelensky is preparing to meet U.S. President Donald Trump in Florida on Dec. 28 amid ongoing efforts to end Russia’s nearly four-year full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In Zelensky's Dec. 26 comments to reporters, the president said that Ukraine and the U.S. plan to discuss several issues, including security guarantees, economic cooperation, as well as Donbas and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, at the meeting in Florida.
