War

Zelensky pays respects to victims of May 14 Russian attack on Kyiv as capital marks day of mourning

3 min read
Zelensky pays respects to victims of May 14 Russian attack on Kyiv as capital marks day of mourning
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pays tribute to the victims at the site of a nine-story residential building partially destroyed by a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, Ukraine on May 15, 2026 (Ukrainian Presidency / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)

President Volodymyr Zelensky on May 15 paid his respects to the victims of the previous day's Russian missile attack that destroyed part of an apartment building in Kyiv, killing 24 people, including three children.

The visit came an hour after first responders concluded search and rescue efforts at the site, 28 hours after a Russian missile struck the building in Kyiv's Darnytskyi district.

"The world must remember the price Ukraine pays every day to prevent Russian aggression from spreading to other nations," Zelensky wrote on social media.

A day of mourning was being observed in Kyiv on May 15.

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on May 14 following the attack that he instructed to initiate a United Nations Security Council meeting "to respond to Russia's killings of Ukrainian civilians and attacks against humanitarian personnel."

"Such a scale of Russian terror necessitates strong international responses, and I request all states to react," Sybiha said in a post on X.

Fifty-six missiles of various types, including Iskander ballistic and Kinzhal aeroballistic missiles, were launched in the overnight attack, as well as 675 one-way attack drones, according to Ukraine's Air Force.

Zelensky said on May 14 he had instructed Ukraine's military to prepare responses to the attack. Overnight on May 15, Ukraine's military launched a large-scale drone attack striking Russian military and energy infrastructure in multiple regions of Russia.

Moscow also spoke the language of retaliation, despite being the aggressor in the war and striking Ukrainian cities regularly from the outset.

"Russian troops, in response to the terrorist attacks of Ukraine on civilian objects of the Russian Federation, carried out a massive retaliatory strike," the country's defense ministry said.

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Francis Farrell

Reporter

Francis Farrell is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent. He is the co-author of War Notes, the Kyiv Independent's weekly newsletter about the war. For the second year in a row, the Kyiv Independent received a grant from the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust to support his front-line reporting for the year 2025-2026. Francis won the Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandy for war correspondents in the young reporter category in 2023, and was nominated for the European Press Prize in 2024. Francis speaks Ukrainian and Hungarian and is an alumnus of Leiden University in The Hague and University College London. He has previously worked as a managing editor at the online media project Lossi 36, as a freelance journalist and documentary photographer, and at the OSCE and Council of Europe field missions in Albania and Ukraine.

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