Ukraine Mourns 24 Dead as Zelenskyy Threatens Russian Oil Strikes

Ukraine spent May 15 in mourning and in motion at the same time. Kyiv and Lviv lowered their flags as emergency teams finished pulling bodies from the nine-storey apartment block in Kyiv hit on Thursday by a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile that killed at least 24 people, including three children. The Ukrainian air force said the wave of more than 1,500 drones and dozens of missiles fired across three days was the largest Russian barrage since February 2022; the foreign ministry called it 'one of the deadliest attacks on Kyiv' since the start of the full-scale war. Residents brought flowers and stuffed animals to a makeshift memorial at the destroyed block, and entertainment events across the capital of three million were cancelled.

Out of that grief came the most explicit Ukrainian threat statement of the spring. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was 'entirely justified' in striking Russia's oil industry, military production and 'those directly responsible for committing war crimes against Ukraine and Ukrainians.' Hours earlier Ukraine had launched a long-range drone attack on several Russian regions including the Ryazan oil refinery — the spine of the energy-targeting doctrine he was now defending out loud. The same address paired the retaliation with two new alarms.

First, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian Defence Intelligence had obtained Russian documents listing nearly two dozen political centres and military command posts as targets for new missile and drone strikes; satellite imagery dated May 6 showed coordinates of the presidential office, residence and underground facilities in central Kyiv. Second, he said Kyiv had evidence Moscow was working through Aleksandr Lukashenko to draw Belarus 'deeper into the war', either by helping launch operations from Belarusian territory against Ukraine's Chernihiv-Kyiv axis or by attacking 'one of the NATO countries'. Ukrainian defence forces were instructed to prepare a response plan.

On the battlefield the day produced one rare Ukrainian win: the 129th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade liberated the village of Odradne in northeastern Kharkiv Oblast, occupied by Russia since 22 November 2025, recovering roughly 22 km² of territory and, according to the 16th Army Corps, killing 56 Russian troops. Russia and Ukraine exchanged 205 prisoners of war each — the first stage of a planned 1,000-for-1,000 swap.

The day's hardest political news came from Washington. The US Army confirmed the cancellation of a planned rotation of 4,000 American troops to Poland; General Christopher LaNeve told the House Armed Services Committee that 'it made the most sense for that brigade to not do its deployment in theater'. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said the move was 'logistical in nature' and would not affect deterrence; defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz tied the cancellation directly to Trump's earlier withdrawal of 5,000 US soldiers from Germany and floated the prospect that Poland could in fact end up with a 'permanent, rather than rotational' US presence. Trump told reporters the Ukrainians 'took a big hit' and that the strikes could set back the war's diplomatic resolution — 'until last night, it was looking good'.

Two further incidents underlined how thin the seal around the war remains. A forest fire in the Chornobyl exclusion zone, ignited on May 14 after a Russian drone was shot down and burning forest litter and deadwood, had spread to more than 80 hectares across three locations by midday, with 148 rescuers deployed; no radiation threat was reported. And in Kherson's Ostriv area, Russian FPV drones twice struck a clearly marked UN humanitarian convoy carrying Andrea De Domenico, head of OCHA in Ukraine, and eight other UN staff — the mission's movements had been coordinated with both Ukrainian and Russian forces.