Even in a city where people have adapted the routines of ordinary life to wartime, the scene unfolding above Kyiv is a reminder that while the fighting is concentrated a hundred miles east, the Ukrainian that capital still has a Russian bull’s-eye in it.
Ballistic missiles started roared shortly after 11 a.m. Monday — a rare daytime barrage that sent city residents racing for cover — and was quickly shot down. Then the attacks erupted again early on Tuesday, which made it clear that although Kyiv, with the help of Western allies, built the air defense system, the Russian forces intended to test for soft that place.
They changed the time of the bombing, the combination of weapons used and the trajectories of the missiles and drones, recently flying them under the river banks and in the valleys to avoid detection, it was said of Ukrainian officials.
Russia is trying to “confuse and mislead our air defense system,” Yurii Ihnat, spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force Command, said in an appearance on national television over the weekend. “It uses the topography of the area to disappear from radars.”
On Monday, 11 ballistic missiles targeted Ukraine, and 11 were intercepted, Ukrainian officials said. But debris from in-air collisions caused fires and other damage, as terrified Ukrainians looked to the clear blue skies of their populous city to witness a battle. which occurred with explosive force.
Children shouldering backpacks run in panic after booms echo down a city street, a video widely shared by Ukrainian officials on social media shows.
“How they wept, how they shouted!” said Natalia Nevidoma, 53, who was cleaning the front porch of a restaurant as teachers led small children through the entrance. “You know, it’s very painful and scary.”
No known deaths, and only one injury, were reported from the missile strike, but it drew immediate condemnation from the Ukrainian government. Russian forces “struck a peaceful city during the day, when most residents were at work and on the streets,” Serhii Popko, the head of the Kyiv regional military administration, said in a statement.
“In other words,” said Mr. Popko, “the Russians have clearly shown that they intend to destroy the civilian population.”
Russian officials have consistently denied targeting civilian areas. They said Monday’s strikes were aimed at air bases, and, Ukrainian officials said Moscow had hit at least one military installation, damaging an airfield in Khmelnytskyi, western Ukraine. “Five aerial vehicles are out of service,” the Khmelnytskyi Regional Military Administration said in a statement.
The spate of attacks in Kyiv in recent weeks has rivaled at the time some of the most horrific moments of the war for the city of 3.6 million. In Kyiv, as well as elsewhere in Ukraine, Moscow continues to deploy attack drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, Ukrainian officials said. On Sunday, Ukrainian air defense teams repelled the largest Russian drone attack on Kyiv since the start of the war.
Kyiv was not the only target on Monday.
The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia had fired up to 40 cruise missiles and 35 Iranian-made attack drones before dawn on Monday. It said 37 of the missiles and 29 of the drones were shot down. But a missile hit a village in the Kharkiv region, Kivsharivka, injuring at least three people, according to the local military administration.
In Kyiv, emergency crews were dispatched to put out fires caused by falling debris. The Kyiv regional military administration said it was working to clear at least six locations around the capital, including a major road.
Kseniia Khyzhniak, 35, was using her day off to find a TV series when the sirens sent her to her children’s school race.
“I looked at the sky, and the air defense rocket was flying there,” said Ms. Khyzhniak. There was a bang, and then another as her two young children ran to meet her and they raced to the shelter, holding hands, she said.
“Hurry up!” Ukrainians standing at the entrance were shouting, waving at them, he said.
Oleksandr, 40, a technology worker who declined to give his last name, said he, too, found himself heading to the shelter — though he wasn’t sure what the point was.
“Getting hit by a car and dying is more likely in Kyiv right now than dying by shelling, mathematically,” he said. “But I can’t tell my body how to react, you know?”
Anatolii Semenov, a 68-year-old retired homemaker, is more philosophical.
“I didn’t go to the shelter,” he said. “There was nothing I could do. There is a saying in Ukrainian: ‘What must be must be.’ My father taught me that.”
