Russia used its Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile in a fresh overnight strike on Ukraine, hitting infrastructure in Lviv and killing four people in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian authorities. The BBC said it was only the second time Moscow had deployed the hypersonic weapon, which it first used against Dnipro in November 2024.
The missile appeared to be part of a much larger barrage. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia fired 13 ballistic missiles, 22 cruise missiles and 242 drones overnight, targeting energy facilities and civilian infrastructure. One strike damaged a building at the Qatari embassy. In Kyiv, the blast and follow-on strikes left a paramedic dead while he was responding to a damaged apartment block, and city officials said a so-called double-tap attack hit rescuers after the first strike.
Lviv was not the main centre of the violence, but it became the clearest sign that Moscow was using the missile far from the front line. Social media videos showed repeated explosions on the outskirts of the western city, about 60 kilometres from the Polish border. Ukrainian officials said the strike damaged infrastructure there, while Andrii Sybiha, the foreign minister, warned that firing such a weapon close to the EU and NATO border was a threat to the whole continent.
Moscow said the attack was retaliation for what it called a Ukrainian drone strike on Vladimir Putin's residence in late December. Kyiv denies carrying out that attack, and the EU has said it had serious doubts that it ever happened. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Russia's response showed that Putin did not want peace and was instead answering diplomacy with more destruction. Donald Trump also said he did not think the alleged drone strike on the Russian president's home had occurred.
The human cost of the raid was immediate. Kyiv lost power and heat in several neighbourhoods during a cold spell, and Mayor Vitali Klitschko said nearly 6,000 apartment buildings were without heat because of damage to critical infrastructure. Residents described a city filled with generators, emergency repairs and wreckage. Ukraine has increasingly answered Russia's attacks on its energy system with its own strikes on Russian infrastructure, and the same night half a million people in Belgorod were left without power after Ukrainian shelling. That tit-for-tat pattern underlines how the war's winter phase is now being fought through electricity, heating and the ability to keep cities functioning.
