At least one person was killed and 19 others were injured on Monday when Russian drones struck the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv in broad daylight, marking a grim new turn in Moscow's air campaign against Ukraine. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the daytime raid sent six people to hospital as air-raid sirens wailed and black smoke billowed over the capital. The attack on one of Ukraine's oldest scientific institutions came as Russia leans ever harder on fast, high-flying jet drones — weapons Ukraine's air defences are finding far harder to stop.
A daytime strike on the heart of Kyiv
The Academy was hit in the middle of the working day. Flames leaped from the historic building and rubble was strewn across its courtyard as firefighters doused the structure with water and searched the wreckage for survivors. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha accused Russia of cynicism for choosing a scientific institution as its target. "Russia is deliberately expanding the boundaries of what it believes the world will tolerate," he said. "Every attack left without a strong response only encourages the next one."
The Academy was not the only target. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a pharmaceutical company, petrol stations and a medical facility were also hit in Kyiv on Monday, while civilian facilities, businesses and communications infrastructure were struck in other cities and regions. In the southeastern city of Dnipro, a Russian drone attack on a business centre killed three people and injured 19, according to Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi. Regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha said the centre was surrounded by residential buildings, a park, a library and offices: "Hundreds of people are here in the middle of the working day." Another person was killed in a logistics office in Synelnykove, southeast of Dnipro.
The jet-drone problem
In recent weeks, Russia has begun hitting Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with faster, high-flying jet drones — a shift that is stretching Ukraine's air defences to their limits. Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Ukraine was able to intercept only just over half of them, far fewer than when facing the older, propeller-powered versions.
The scale of the onslaught is staggering. Ukraine's Air Force said Russia sent 165 strike drones at Ukraine overnight into September 28, of which 79 had jet engines; 112 drones were destroyed or disabled by air defences and electronic warfare, with strikes recorded in 14 areas. Russia's Defence Ministry, in turn, claimed it shot down 254 Ukrainian drones over its own territory and Crimea during the night — figures neither side's claims can be independently verified.
Moscow is also widening the target set. Beyond warehouses, port facilities and energy infrastructure, Russian strikes in recent days have hit data centres and telecoms facilities, following the weekend attack on the Kyivstar headquarters — a clear effort to blind Ukraine's communications as well as its logistics.
Kyiv answers with pressure and retaliation
Zelenskyy framed the strikes as a test for the West. "Every one of Ukraine's partners must see from this terror, from these strikes, that supporting Ukraine means truly supporting people's lives," he wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine is not only absorbing the blows. Zelenskyy said on Monday that Ukrainian forces had struck Russian oil facilities in the Krasnodar region and two defence plants, continuing Kyiv's campaign against the revenues and factories that sustain Moscow's war. The exchange of long-range strikes has become a defining feature of this phase of the war — even as both sides formally deny deliberately targeting civilians.
For the Kremlin, the Academy strike sends an unmistakable message: no part of Kyiv's civilian or institutional life is off-limits. For Ukraine, it is proof — delivered in daylight, in the middle of the working week — that the air-defence gap over its cities is now its most urgent battlefield.
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