Russia Pounds Kyiv for Twelve Hours on Sixth Straight Day of Attacks
Russia bombarded Kyiv with cruise and ballistic missiles, jet-powered drones, glide bombs and artillery for more than twelve hours, killing at least a dozen people and wounding more across nine regions — an unprecedented sixth consecutive day of heavy attacks on the capital, timed as millions of children returned for the fifth school year since the invasion. “Russia’s army is bogged down on the ground, and that is why they are killing civilians from the skies,” said the EU’s Kaja Kallas.
Six consecutive days is a change of doctrine, not a bad week: sustained bombardment of a capital at this tempo requires stockpiles, production and a decision that terror is the strategy — Kallas’s formulation, cruel and accurate, is that the skies compensate for the ground. The first-day-of-school timing reads as deliberate; Russia has repeatedly chosen symbolic calendars for its heaviest strikes. What should worry Europe’s capitals is the arithmetic on the other side of the ledger: air defence interceptors are consumed faster than the West replaces them, and every twelve-hour night drains a finite pool. With the world’s attention consumed by the Gulf, Moscow is testing how much escalation goes unanswered. Watch interceptor resupply announcements — and whether the seventh day follows the sixth.