Kyiv strikes (2022–present)

Kyiv, Ukraine's capital with approximately 2,950,000 residents, has been a recurring target of the Russian Armed Forces during the Russo-Ukrainian war. In February–April 2022, Russian forces attempted to capture the city directly but were repelled. Since that failed offensive, attacks on Kyiv have been conducted remotely through airstrikes. Beginning in October 2022, Kyiv has also been periodically struck by Iranian-made drones operated in Russian service.

From the start of the invasion on 24 February 2022 through 28 May 2023, air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv for a cumulative total of 887 hours, equivalent to roughly 36 days. The city has 1,078 designated bomb shelters, though a government commission found in June 2023 that only about half of them were usable.

The scale of attacks intensified over time. In 2024 alone, Kyiv endured approximately 1,300 drone strikes and more than 250 missile attacks across roughly 200 separate airstrikes by Russian forces, accompanied by around 500 air raid alerts that year. These attacks caused damage to approximately 550 residential buildings and contributed to daily power outages averaging nine hours. Across the first three years of the full-scale war, 210 civilians were killed in Kyiv, including 11 children.

Strikes continued into 2025. An overnight attack on 3–4 July 2025 involved a record number of drones and missiles directed at the Kyiv metropolitan area, breaking the daily record for Russian long-range drone launches across Ukraine since the invasion began. A further escalation occurred overnight on 8–9 July 2025, when 728 drones and 11 missiles targeted the Kyiv metropolitan area along with ten of Ukraine's 23 oblasts.

In January 2026, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko stated that 600,000 residents had left the capital following Russian strikes on 9 January that left half of the city's residential buildings without heating. Due to further strikes in early February 2026, Kyiv residents reportedly had electricity for less than two hours per day. Following the 2026 Starobilsk strike, Russia reportedly called on foreign diplomats and civilians to evacuate Kyiv, warning of retaliatory airstrikes against the city.

According to the Wikipedia summary, the two deadliest single strikes recorded were the attack on 31 July 2025 and the attack on 2 July 2026, each of which killed 31 people.

This dossier is based on a single aggregating Wikipedia source; two additional references (Reuters and BBC News) are cited by that article as corroborating contemporaneous coverage but were not independently reviewed for this summary.