A residential building damaged by a Russian strike on Kyiv, Ukraine, on January 9, 2026. EVGENIY MALOLETKA / AP
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday, January 9, that it had used the Oreshnik hypersonic missile on “strategic targets” overnight to hit Ukraine, saying the attacks were in response to a December drone strike on a residence of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Ukraine has denied it was behind that attack.
Moscow did not provide any other details on the attack, but Ukrainian authorities said an “infrastructure facility” had been struck near the western city of Lviv by a ballistic missile travelling at hypersonic speed. In Kyiv, drone strikes across the city killed four people and wounded at least 24 others, including emergency rescuers, police said.
At a residential building on the city’s left bank, a medic was killed while responding to a strike as the site was hit a second time. Some neighborhoods were plunged into darkness during what Mayor Vitali Klitschko described as a “massive enemy missile attack.”
Across the border in Russia’s Belgorod, the governor said more than half a million people were without power or heating after a Ukrainian attack targeted the region’s utilities. Nearly 200,000 people were also cut off from water supplies, Vyacheslav Gladkov added.
Ukraine’s military put the entire country on missile alert early Friday after confirming Russian bombers were airborne. In the western city of Lviv, the Ukrainian Air Force said a ballistic missile, travelling at about 13,000 kilometres (8,000 miles) per hour, struck “infrastructure facilities” just before midnight.
The regional military administration said afterwards that radiation levels were within normal range. Russia had already used an Oreshnik missile with a conventional warhead to strike the city of Dnipro in central Ukraine in late 2024.
‘Quite far’ from any deal
Russia’s latest barrage came after the US Embassy in Kyiv warned on Thursday that a “potentially significant air attack” could occur any time within the next several days. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had echoed the rare warning in his evening address.
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Ukraine was still scrambling to restore heating and water to hundreds of thousands of households after strikes targeted energy facilities in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. “This is truly a national level emergency,” Borys Filatov, mayor of Dnipro, said as families were left without power in the frigid depths of winter.
While Zelensky has said an agreement between Kyiv and Washington for US security guarantees was “essentially ready for finalisation,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz acknowledged a ceasefire deal was still “quite far” given Russia’s position.
Moscow baulked after European leaders and US envoys announced this week that post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a multinational force. In its first response after a summit in Paris, Russia called the plan “dangerous” and “destructive.”