Fourteen people are dead and 121 injured, 22 of them children, after Russian drones hit a shopping centre in Kryvyi Rih on Friday. Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the local administration, gave the figures and said the rescue operation was still under way.
Kryvyi Rih is President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown, and he was blunt about what he saw. The attack was a double-tap, he said: one wave of drones hit the area, then a second came in as rescuers arrived. “Attacks like these are nothing less than terrorist acts,” he wrote on social media.
The city has been struck many times in a war now more than four years old. In April 2025, an attack killed 20 people, nine of them children.
A week of large strikes
Friday’s attack came 24 hours after Russia hit Kyiv overnight with scores of missiles and drones, killing at least 16 people. Large strikes have become routine this summer. A Russian attack on Kyiv and its surrounding region a little over two weeks ago killed 17, and nine died in the city two days before that. The United Nations said last week that Kyiv was among the hardest-hit cities in July, with at least 54 civilians killed and 202 injured.
The catch for Ukraine is air defence. Russian forces have stepped up ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv in recent months, and Ukraine is chronically short of U.S.-made Patriot interceptors, the only weapon in its arsenal that can shoot those missiles down.
Earlier on Friday, a Russian drone attack on the Kharkiv region killed two women, aged 73 and 66, and wounded two others, regional head Oleh Syniehubov said. Ukraine’s air force said on Telegram that it shot down or suppressed 107 of 135 drones launched overnight.
Ukraine strikes back
Ukrainian drones were busy too. Zelensky said one hit an oil refinery in Perm, more than 1,600 kilometres from the Ukrainian border, and others struck the Marinovka military airfield in Russia’s Volgograd region. The Russian outlet Astra reported that a Lukoil-operated refinery in Perm caught fire, while local officials said only that damage was recorded at an unidentified “industrial facility.”
In Russia’s Belgorod region, officials said a Ukrainian drone struck a car near the village of Razumnoye, killing one person and wounding four, two of them seriously. Russia’s Defence Ministry said its air defences intercepted 325 Ukrainian drones overnight over 15 Russian regions and Crimea.
