Russian Missiles Kill at Least 15 in Kyiv as Air Defenses Dwindle

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Russia pummeled Kyiv with missiles overnight, killing at least 15 people and wounding about 40 others, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday. The barrage was the latest deadly assault on the capital and again exposed Ukraine’s increasingly depleted air defenses.

In a sign that the Russian military is growing more confident of penetrating Ukrainian defenses, it did not deploy an opening barrage of long-range drones — a tactic that, until recently, was used to overwhelm interceptors and clear a path for missiles. This time, Russian forces hit Kyiv with a salvo of ballistic missiles at the outset.

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Worried that the gaps in aerial defenses have left them increasingly exposed, many Kyiv residents now spend several nights a week sheltering underground in subway stations and parking lots. Nearly 40,000 residents stayed in the capital’s subway stations overnight, according to the local authorities on Thursday.

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In his statement on Thursday, Mr. Zelensky again sounded the alarm about Ukraine’s weakened air defenses. He urged allies to provide more military assistance, especially U.S.-made Patriot interceptors, which remain the country’s most reliable defense against ballistic missiles.

The strain on air defenses has become such that the Ukrainian Air Force announced last week that it would stop disclosing the numbers of ballistic missiles fired by Russia and shot down in each attack, saying that poor interception rates were generating negative headlines that risked scaring people.

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