On Monday, a Russian drone strike set fire to the building of the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv, killing two people. The attack — captured in photographs showing the landmark scientific building engulfed in flames — landed amid what is being described as some of the most persistent drone strikes on the Ukrainian capital since the full-scale war began.
The National Academy of Sciences is Ukraine's foremost civilian research institution. Its burning building in the heart of the capital has become a stark symbol of a Russian aerial campaign that is no longer confined to the night and no longer sparing the city's civic core.
A strike on the heart of Kyiv's science
Photographs published by the Associated Press show the Academy building burning after the drone strike on Monday, with emergency crews working through smoke and debris in central Kyiv. A man was photographed running past a nearby hospital that was damaged in the same wave of strikes.
Ukraine's emergency services said later in the evening that one of the two dead had been recovered from under the rubble of the struck building. The timing of the attack — in daylight, in the centre of the capital — underscores how far Russia's strike pattern has shifted from the early war years of predominantly nocturnal raids on the outskirts.
Kyiv's administration has repeatedly warned that Moscow is deliberately testing the capital's defences with sustained, overlapping waves of drones designed to exhaust air-defence crews and munitions.
The assault did not stop overnight
The attacks continued into the early hours of Tuesday. Explosions were heard across Kyiv as Russia kept up its near-daily bombardment, with missile debris falling into the courtyard of a residential building and a non-residential building catching fire elsewhere in the city, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram.
The pattern is now entrenched. For weeks, Russian forces have staged intensive attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities almost continuously throughout the day, not just at night — using cruise and ballistic missiles, powerful glide bombs and jet-powered drones, according to recent reporting.
The capital is not alone. On Sunday, in the northern city of Sumy — a frequent Russian target near the border — three glide bombs struck near a family support centre, killing two people, regional governor Oleh Hryhorov said on Telegram. In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, a drone struck a car and killed its driver, prosecutors said. In the southern Odesa region, Russian strikes killed one person and injured two others, local military administration head Oleh Kiper reported.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said nine people had been killed and more than 80 injured in Russian drone strikes across the country on Sunday, including in Kyiv.
What Moscow claims it is hitting
Russia's defence ministry, for its part, said its forces had carried out overnight drone strikes on logistics centres, port and transport infrastructure, communications centres and vessels it linked to the Ukrainian military.
Moscow claimed the strikes hit a data centre in Kyiv, logistics hubs in the Kyiv and Odesa regions, two drone storages in Mykolaiv, the headquarters of a naval base and of the State Border Guard Service, military stores in Kiliya port, and a cargo ship carrying what Russia described as military and dual-use goods to the port of Odesa. Reuters, which reported the ministry's claims, said it could not independently verify them.
Both sides in the more than four-and-a-half-year-old war deny targeting civilians. But the record on the ground in Kyiv tells its own story: a burning research institute in the city centre, a damaged hospital, and missile debris raining down on a residential courtyard.
Kyiv keeps calling for more air defence
The strike on the Academy of Sciences arrives as Ukraine intensifies its appeals for additional Western air-defence systems, including more Patriot batteries, to counter an increasingly complex Russian aerial assault. Kyiv has also answered with its own long-range campaign, sending drones deep into Russia to hit oil refineries and military-industrial targets.
Russia's message, delivered through the skies over Kyiv day and night, is one of unrelenting pressure — on the capital's infrastructure, its defences, and its people. The burning Academy building, a civilian symbol of Ukrainian science, stands as the latest evidence of where that pressure is falling.
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