Russian drone and missile strikes killed at least two people overnight in Ukraine, officials said on Saturday, while a Ukrainian drone attack in Russia’s Krasnodar region killed two others—just a day after a strike on a Ukrainian shopping mall killed 16 people, reports the AP. In the latest attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that one person was killed and another wounded when ballistic missiles hit railway infrastructure in the capital, Kyiv. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that its forces had hit a locomotive depot. Moscow’s forces have recently intensified their ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv, exploiting Ukraine’s chronic shortage of US-made Patriot air defense interceptors, the sole weapon in its arsenal able to shoot down the missiles.
Russian drone strikes also killed one person overnight in a village in the Zaporizhzhia region, local officials said on Saturday. Zelensky said three people were wounded in an attack on a minibus in the regional capital, also called Zaporizhzhia. In Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, authorities said that two children were killed and two adults were wounded in a Ukrainian drone strike. The latest attacks came a day after Russian drones struck a shopping center in the city of Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, on Friday. Dnipropetrovsk regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said early Saturday that the death toll had risen to 16 and nine people remain missing after that attack, which wounded another 130.
Kryvyi Rih is the hometown of Zelensky, who described the attack as a double-tap strike, in which an initial wave of drones hit the area, followed by a second wave as rescue workers responded. The Ukrainian leader said the fire, which spread across 97,000 square feet, had been extinguished and rescue efforts were underway. Kryvyi Rih has been hit multiple times during the 4 1/2-year all-out war between Russia and Ukraine, with one of the deadliest occurring in April 2025, when 20 people were killed, including nine children.
Large-scale Russian strikes have become a regular occurrence this summer, with Friday’s attacks landing just 24 hours after Russia pounded Kyiv with scores of missiles and drones in a nighttime assault that killed 16 people. At the same time, Ukraine has shifted the war onto Russian soil through long-range drone strikes on oil facilities that have caused fuel shortages across Russia. It also has unsettled the Russian public by striking warehouses of Wildberries, the country’s biggest online retailer.