Russia fired more than 70 missiles and 280 drones at Ukraine overnight into Thursday, killing at least eight civilians including children as young as five, and possibly sent a cruise missile drifting into NATO territory in Poland. This is what the war looks like when Ukraine is running out of air defense interceptors. This is what impunity looks like.
Children Are Dead. Russia Says It Hit Military Sites.
In Kryvyi Rih, President Zelensky's hometown, a Russian Iskander-M ballistic missile struck a family home and killed six people, according to the New York Post. Among them were children. NPR reports the dead included a 6-year-old girl and boys aged 11 and 17. Their parents were also killed. Two more children were pulled alive from the rubble.
"It was an ordinary home, blown to smithereens by a ballistic missile," Zelensky wrote on X. That's the whole story, really. A family home. A ballistic missile. Six people dead, some of them small enough to fit in a parent's arms.
The Russian Defense Ministry, with its customary detachment from observable reality, said its forces struck military facilities, specifically air bases, arms factories, missile plants, aircraft repair facilities, and chemical plants. Drone production depots. All of it. The six-year-old's house must have been a very convincing drone depot.
Across Ukraine, From Kyiv to Lviv, the Damage Spreads
This wasn't a targeted strike. It was a blitz spanning at least ten Ukrainian regions, as NPR reports Zelensky confirmed. In Kyiv, a 31-year-old man was killed when ballistic missiles hit the capital, with residential buildings, a market, and a garage cooperative among the damaged sites, per the National Police press service.
In Lviv, the western city near the Polish border that is about as far from the front lines as you can get while still being in Ukraine, a cruise missile attack wounded 34 people including three children aged 6, 13, and 15, according to NPR. Emergency crews were still searching through rubble Thursday morning. Lviv is where Ukraine stores and manufactures weapons, which Russia knows perfectly well, and which is also where a lot of people simply live.
One more person died in the Poltava region when a drone struck company warehouses, regional officials confirmed. Reuters witnessed explosions in Kyiv. The death toll may still rise.
A Russian Missile May Have Flown Into Poland. NATO's Watching.
Here is where the story gets bigger than Ukraine. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace overnight, violating NATO territory. Poland scrambled F-16 fighters to identify and intercept it. The object disappeared from radar before it could be caught, and a helicopter crew later found what appears to be an impact site in an undeveloped field near the village of Tarnawa-Kolonia in Lublin province, according to the Polish Armed Forces operational command.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk traveled to the site Thursday morning. Polish authorities have not confirmed exactly what crashed. According to NPR, Polish police in the Lublin region also received reports of a loud bang and discovered a crater with scattered debris from an unidentified object.
Sybiha called it a clear demonstration that strengthening Ukraine's air defenses is urgent, framing it as a guarantee of wider European protection. He's right. A missile that misses Ukraine doesn't stop at Ukraine's border just because Ukraine does.
The Air Defense Crisis Behind All of This
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Russia's escalating bombardment is specifically timed to exploit a critical shortage of Western-supplied anti-ballistic missile interceptors, as NPR reports. The Iran war has drained stockpiles of Patriot interceptors. Ukraine just can't shoot everything down right now, and Russia knows it.
Zelensky met with Trump in Washington two days before this attack, and Trump agreed to license Ukraine to manufacture its own Patriot systems, according to Reuters. But as NPR notes, setting up that production line could take a very long time. In the gap between now and when those factories come online, Russia has an open window.
"Given the critical shortage of air defense missiles from our partners, our warriors are accomplishing truly incredible things," Zelensky said on social media. Translation: they are doing everything humanly possible, and it is still not enough, and people are dying.
Ukraine Is Also Hitting Back, Hard
Ukraine is not sitting still. Russia said its air defenses downed 258 Ukrainian drones overnight, covering Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. And Ukraine has been systematically going after Wildberries, Russia's largest online retailer, in a campaign that is equal parts military strategy and economic warfare.
A Wildberries depot in Russia's Penza region caught fire after a Ukrainian drone strike, injuring one person and forcing the evacuation of 200 workers, per NPR. A second warehouse, in Sarapul in the Udmurtia region over 1,000 kilometers from Ukraine's border, also caught fire after a drone attack. The New York Post reports that drone strikes have now damaged nearly a dozen Wildberries warehouses, destroying about 10 percent of the company's storage capacity and hitting tens of thousands of small businesses that rely on the platform.
Russia's largest bank, Sberbank, has warned it may have to boost loan-loss provisions because of the financial damage flowing from the Wildberries strikes, the Post reports. Ukraine is playing a long game here, trying to make the war feel real inside Russia's borders. It appears to be working.
The Dingo Take
A six-year-old girl is dead. Her parents are dead. Her brothers are dead. Russia fired a ballistic missile at a house in a city where the president of Ukraine grew up, and the Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement about military targets. This is the information environment we are living in, where the gap between what is said and what is true has become so vast that no one even bothers to narrow it anymore.
The Poland situation deserves more attention than it's getting. A NATO member scrambled jets, found a probable impact site, and the prime minister drove out to a field in Lublin to look at a crater. That is not a normal Thursday. Article 5, the provision that makes an attack on one NATO member an attack on all of them, is the foundational promise of the entire alliance. If Russia is casually lobbing cruise missiles into Polish fields, the question of what exactly constitutes a trigger for that clause needs an answer faster than anyone seems to be moving.
Trump promised Ukraine licenses to build its own Patriot systems. Great. That will help in a few years, maybe. Right now, today, Russia is firing 70 missiles at a time at cities full of people who are out of interceptors to stop them. The distance between a press conference promise and a working missile defense factory is measured in Ukrainian lives. Someone should say that louder.
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