Russia launches one of its biggest air assaults of the war, killing at least 15 across Ukraine

Russia launched one of the largest air assaults of the war on Ukraine overnight, firing around 70 missiles and waves of drones at cities across the country and killing at least 15 people.

The deadliest strike hit the northern city of Pryluky around 6:30 a.m. local time, when a missile slammed into a five story apartment block and sheared off several sections of the building. Regional governor Vyacheslav Chaus said at least nine people were killed, including three children, and around 40 were wounded. Emergency crews spent the day picking through the rubble with ladders, warning more people could be trapped. A 40 year old massage therapist who survived with her husband and child told reporters their windows blew out as they slept: they covered the child with their bodies and hid in the bathroom while the apartment came apart around them.

Six more people were killed in Kyiv, Oleksandria and Kremenchuk. In Kyiv, two died in a fire in the densely populated Darnytskyi neighborhood. In Dnipro and Kremenchuk, missiles damaged nine apartment buildings and killed two more. The strikes hit 18 locations in all, with Kyiv, Kharkiv, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk among the main targets.

President Volodymyr Zelensky called it "one of the most vile strikes" of the nearly five year war, noting it came on Vladimir Putin's 74th birthday. "Seventy missiles in total, many of them ballistic," he said on Telegram. "One of the key targets was our energy infrastructure. The Russians wanted to strike painfully and demonstratively." Ukraine's air force said it neutralized 161 incoming targets, including 117 drones, 39 cruise missiles and five ballistic or high speed missiles, an interception rate above 80 percent that marked a sharp jump from the 50 to 60 percent of recent weeks as Russia deploys faster jet powered drones. Russia's defense ministry said it carried out a "massive strike" on military industrial targets, including facilities of the Ukrainian defense firm Fire Point, which Moscow accuses of building long range cruise missiles.

Zelensky said Ukraine hit back at targets in Russia's Perm, Samara and Astrakhan regions over the past 24 hours, with what he called "also a response in the Black Sea." He renewed his plea for Patriot air defense systems, the only weapon in Ukraine's arsenal that can stop high velocity ballistic missiles, warning that tight global supplies have been drained by this war and the Iran war alike.

The pattern is now familiar: with winter approaching, Russia is again trying to break Ukraine's energy grid and freeze the country into concessions.