Russia Hits 25-Storey Odesa Tower in 129-Drone Night; Steelworkers Killed
Russia’s overnight barrage — ballistic and cruise missiles behind 129 drones, many jet-powered — set a 25-storey Odesa residential tower alight, injuring at least 35, and killed two ArcelorMittal subcontractors in a strike on Kryvyi Rih’s industrial heart; two more died in Zaporizhzhia homes. A drone hit a working monastery in Kherson, killing a clergyman. Ukraine struck industrial facilities in Russia’s Samara region in reply. Mr Zelensky said civilian sites were being targeted deliberately.
The target list reads like a societal cross-section by design — a tower block, a steel plant, homes, a monastery — and that breadth is the strategy: jet-powered drones in numbers designed to exhaust interceptors, aimed at the proposition that nowhere in Ukraine is categorised out of the war. The ArcelorMittal deaths carry particular weight: foreign-invested heavy industry is Ukraine’s economic survival plan, and every subcontractor killed at a steelworks prices the reconstruction the war’s end is supposed to fund. The monastery joins the newsroom and the SBU’s windows on the list of targets chosen for meaning rather than military value. Watch the interception-rate trend as jet-drone volumes rise — the arithmetic that decides whether Ukraine’s cities remain livable is drifting the wrong way.