Russia Launches Record Overnight Barrage on Kyiv, Killing 8

Russia launched what Ukrainian officials say was the largest combined air attack of the war between the evening of May 13 and the morning of May 14, firing 1,567 drones and 56 missiles by President Volodymyr Zelensky's count after a meeting of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's Staff. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said 675 drones and 56 missiles, including ballistic ones, were fired in the overnight wave alone between 18:00 on May 13 and 08:00 on May 14, damaging 11 residential buildings in Kyiv and more than 50 across the country. In the Darnytskyi district, a missile collapsed a residential block from the first to the ninth floor; Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko put the toll at eight dead, including a 12-year-old girl, with 44 injured and the State Emergency Service reporting about 20 people still missing. Power outages were registered across Volyn, Dnipropetrovsk and other oblasts after strikes on energy infrastructure; Kremenchuk took a hit on its grid, Chornomorsk saw port and residential strikes, and Kharkiv, Rivne and Ivano-Frankivsk also reported impacts.

The institutional response built through the day. Mayor Vitali Klitschko declared May 15 a city day of mourning, with municipal flags at half-mast and entertainment events banned. Sybiha said he had instructed all Ukrainian embassies to lower flags and open books of condolences, that foreign ambassadors in Kyiv would be invited to one of the strike sites, and that he was initiating an emergency UN Security Council meeting. He separately condemned a Russian FPV-drone double strike on a clearly marked UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs vehicle in the Kherson region: "Humanitarian workers are not a target!" The OCHA team — including its in-country leadership, which had been delivering aid to frontline residents — was unhurt, but Sybiha said the vehicle was hit twice in two different locations with a significant interval between strikes, calling the attacks deliberate. Zelensky instructed the Defence Forces and intelligence services to "propose possible formats for our response" and warned that the assessment of Ukrainian diplomacy in May and June would depend on whether partners deliver "anti-ballistic systems and missiles for them" — the central operational gap, with Kyiv long flagging a critical shortage of US Patriot interceptors. Macron called the attack "hypocritical" so soon after the May 9-11 ceasefire and said Moscow was "bombing civilians" because it "is running out of solutions on the military front"; Merz, accepting the Charlemagne Prize in Aachen, said the strikes "speak a different language" than negotiation and rebuffed a Kremlin offer to engage the EU only through Gerhard Schröder; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accused Moscow of indiscriminately targeting civilians.

The diplomatic counter-mobilisation accelerated at the 11th Bucharest Nine summit. Zelensky signed an agreement on defence cooperation and joint drone production with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, and proposed a parallel air-defence agreement to Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs on May 13. Thirteen European countries plus NATO also met in Kyiv on May 12 to launch coordinated anti-ballistic missile production for the eastern flank. The summit-week diplomacy came against the backdrop of Russia's first-ever strike on Zakarpattia Oblast — a daytime Wednesday attack on Uzhhorod, the city on Ukraine's border with Hungary, the first since the 2022 invasion — which prompted Budapest to summon the Russian ambassador, also a first since the start of the full-scale war.

Ukraine's drone offensive remained the campaign's quietest, fastest-moving front. Unmanned Systems Forces Commander Robert Brovdi said Russia is now copying Ukraine's organisational model and plans to scale its UAV personnel to 168,000 by the end of 2026, up from 114,000 in early May after a 28,000-person expansion over the past four months. He pointed in particular to Moscow's centralised production of the Molniya cheap strike drone — of which Ukrainian brigades now intercept up to 60 a day. Going the other way, Ukrainian drones have destroyed 37 Russian Tor, Buk and S-300 air-defence systems between March and May 10, more than double the rate of autumn 2025, and the deep-strike campaign hit a Lukoil refinery in the Perm region hard enough to halt operations and continues to target medium-range systems within 200 km of the front. On May 13-14, the General Staff said its strikes also took out a Tor surface-to-air system near Stary Oskol and a Yastreb counter-battery radar near Novosyolovka in the Belgorod region, alongside a Redut-2US communications complex in Donetsk, a comms hub in Zaporizhzhia, a logistics warehouse in occupied Crimea and a repair unit in Kherson.

Ground combat was just as heavy. The Ukrainian General Staff logged more than 240 engagements on May 14, with the most intense fighting in the Pokrovsk and Huliaipole sectors; Russian forces conducted 91 air strikes, dropped 302 guided bombs and launched 9,828 kamikaze drones over the day. Kyiv also publicised an intercepted communication in which a Russian commander allegedly ordered the decapitation of two dead Ukrainian soldiers in the Huliaipole sector after an ambush on May 12 — an act Ukraine called a war crime under international law, noting the commander's prior links to mistreatment of prisoners of war.

The day closed with a political collapse in Riga. Latvian Prime Minister Evika Siliņa formally announced her resignation, saying she was stepping down but "not giving up" and accusing political rivals of putting jealousy and party interests above responsibility. Her coalition fell apart after the Progressives pulled out following Defence Minister Andris Sprūds's resignation over the May 7 incident in which two Ukrainian drones struck an empty oil storage facility in Rēzekne — the same Latvia whose president received Zelensky's air-defence pact proposal on May 13.