Ukraine war briefing: Missiles shot down during long Russian attack wave

The Ukrainian military said it shot down seven ballistic missiles and 258 drones as Russia carried out a lengthy attack that extended over Wednesday night and well into Thursday. “Overnight, Russia carried out a massive strike against Ukraine, targeting ports, grain storage, energy, industry and other infrastructure with ballistic ⁠and hypersonic missiles and combat drones,” said the foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha. Commuters went to work in Kyiv to the boom of air defences firing at waves of ⁠drones, Reuters reported. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week ‌that Kyiv had received a small ‌batch of US-made Patriot interceptors that can shoot down ballistic missiles.

In Kharkiv, one person was killed and two were injured in a lunchtime attack on a shopping centre, said the regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov. The strikes also targeted a Kyiv-area retail distribution centre and a shipment hub for a toy company, their ⁠chief executives said. Chocolate firm Roshen, founded by former president Petro Poroshenko, ​said one of its warehouses outside Kyiv was ​destroyed. Russian strikes also hit industrial sites, energy facilities and other infrastructure in the central Poltava and southern Odesa regions, as well as the south-eastern city of ​Kryvyi Rih, officials said.

A ⁠Russian attack on a thermal ⁠power plant ⁠in Ukraine’s ​southern city of Kherson ⁠resulted in the loss of ⁠all of its ​generating ‌capacity, state ‌oil and gas company ‌Naftogaz said. “The Russians struck a purely civilian facility that provides heat to ‌a significant portion of Kherson’s ​residential buildings,” said the company’s CEO, Sergiy Fedorenko. The Kherson regional governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, called for people to leave the city if they could, “especially families with children and elderly people”. “Last night, Russian forces again attacked Kherson’s district heating plant with glide bombs … the facility sustained very serious damage. Kherson may find itself without electricity or heating not for hours or days but for a long period.”

Six Russian drones crossed into the airspace of Ukraine’s neighbour Moldova, local authorities said, prompting the president, Maia Sandu, to “strongly condemn this intimidation”. One of them was found on Moldovan territory.

A Russian serviceman was killed by a car bomb in St Petersburg on Thursday, officials said. His wife was injured. Throughout the war, assassinations have targeted key Russian military personnel, military-industrial figures and prominent supporters of the war effort – both within Russia and in occupied Ukraine. Kyiv’s security services including the SBU have claimed responsibility for some of the killings.

The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont has written about how far Russia is having to go to import diesel and gasoline because of the damage Ukrainian strikes have done to its petroleum industry. So many refineries are damaged that Russian oil is being sent to Kazakhstan for processing into fuels that are shipped back. For the first time, Russia this week bought 200,000 barrels of gasoline from Turkey – the fifth confirmed seaborne delivery of vehicle fuel this summer, after previous shipments from India amounting to 1m barrels in total.

“In the space of a summer,” Peter Beaumont writes, “Russia, once the world’s second-largest producer of crude oil, has been plunged into a desperate scramble to find sources of gasoline to plug the ever-growing holes in its refining capacity.” Russia has signed a deal with the Kondensat oil refinery in western Kazakhstan this week to process Russian crude, with 70% of the refined fuel shipped back to Russia – by rail according to reports, because there is no pipeline. Fuel imports from war ally Belarus this June increased by a factor of 141 compared with June 2025.

The Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden called on Thursday for the EU to look again at using frozen Russian central bank assets to finance Ukraine. The four countries have told the EU executive in a letter: “We believe now is the time to revert to the issue of how we can make further use of Russia’s immobilised assets for the benefit of Ukraine.” The EU has failed to strike a deal on tapping the roughly €200bn (£170bn/US$230bn) after objections from Belgium, where the vast bulk of the financial assets are held, that it could be deemed legally liable. EU countries instead loaned Ukraine €90bn.

An ⁠arson attack planned by three suspects in eastern Slovakia targeted drone maker Skyeton, prosecutors said on Thursday. Skyeton, founded in Ukraine, says it produces drones for civilian and military use in Ukraine and other countries. “The attack was ⁠supposed to aim at the Skyeton company’s factory,” said a spokesperson for the regional prosecutor’s office in the eastern city of Presov. A German prosecutor told ​Reuters that a 26-year-old Latvian had ‌been detained in Hamburg ‌and extradition proceedings were under way. Slovak prosecutors said a ‌Latvian and a Ukrainian had been detained in Slovakia.