Russia attacked Ukraine’s capital with drones and ballistic missiles before dawn on Saturday, officials said, killing at least three people in central Kyiv as part of a broader assault that targeted towns and cities across the country.
Air-raid alarms sounded as emergency crews raced to search for the dead and wounded — a grimly familiar routine in a nation that has been battered by relentless Russian bombardments for nearly three years. Moscow called the attack retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory, which in recent weeks appear to have intensified.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that four ballistic missiles and 39 attack drones had been launched in the assault and that two of the ballistic missiles had been shot down in the Kyiv region. Although the city comes under drone attack almost nightly, ballistic missile launches targeting the capital are less frequent.
The pre-dawn attack ruptured a water main near the city center, sending water cascading through the streets around the battered facade of the Lukianivska subway station. Nearby, smoke was rising from a charred van with at least two burned bodies inside.
As a blaze burned deep inside an industrial building across the street, some firefighters were trying to drag debris away from the front of a heavily damaged McDonald’s. Others concentrated on the huge chunks of glass, debris and insulation covering the sidewalk outside the subway station — typically a place where residents seek safety during attacks.
Investigators walked up and down the street, reaching into the rushing water to look for pieces of shrapnel, and some shopkeepers tried to get through the police cordon.
“It’s very frightening, because this place keeps getting hit again and again,” said Yana, 30, who would give only her first name. “Some things are intercepted, but some always get through.”
When the waters subsided, a large crater was visible in the middle of the road as the sun rose. Yuriy Ihnat, an air force spokesman, told the Ukrainska Pravda news outlet that one of the missiles had been shot down at a low altitude, which would help explain the extensive damage to the street and surrounding buildings.
Ukraine’s air-defense teams had spent hours tracking and trying to shoot down attack drones in the skies above the country. Russia uses drones to hit targets and to exhaust air-defense teams, and for months it has sent swarms of them into Ukraine nearly every night. Many are “dummy” drones, with no warheads, that are meant to overwhelm the mobile air-defense teams who are on watch 24 hours a day.
Kyiv tries to reserve its more sophisticated air-defense systems for contending with cruise and ballistic missiles, which are deadlier and more costly to produce. Ballistic missiles also travel at high speeds, which can make them difficult for air-defense systems to intercept.
On Saturday, one air-raid alert had just ended in Kyiv, shortly before 6 a.m., when booms were heard throughout the city. Seconds later, air-raid sirens began to wail.
The authorities initially said that four people had been killed, but President Volodymyr Zelensky later revised the death toll to three, and said that three others had been wounded in the attack.
A separate strike in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine wounded at least 10 people, he added, warning that more people could still be trapped under the rubble there. An industrial building, along with homes, shops and a church suffered damage, according to local officials.
Zaporizhzhia has come under heavy attack in recent weeks, including a strike this month that killed 13 civilians and injured at least 110 others, according to Ukrainian officials.
On Saturday, the death toll from a Russian missile strike a day earlier in Mr. Zelensky’s hometown, Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, rose to five.
The United Nations estimated this past week that there had been a 30 percent increase in civilian casualties in 2024 compared with a year earlier as Russia seeks to batter Ukraine into submission.
In expressing condolences for the victims in Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia, Mr. Zelensky struck a familiar refrain — urging support from allies in the face of Russian aggression.
“All those who assist the Russian state in this war must face pressure as impactful as these strikes,” he said in a statement. “We can achieve this only through unity with the entire world.”
As the toll from nearly three years of war has climbed, Ukraine has been building its arsenal of missiles and long-range drones to hit back. In recent weeks, Ukraine has stepped up its campaign of targeting oil and gas facilities deep inside Russia — an attempt to hobble Moscow’s war machine on its home territory.
That effort continued on Saturday, with Ukraine’s military saying it had struck an oil depot in the Tula region, south of Moscow. There were also reports of a strike in the Kaluga region, about 100 miles southwest of Moscow.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said that air defenses had intercepted 46 Ukrainian drones overnight, including five over the Tula region and seven in the Kaluga region. It did not comment on any damage.
The strike on Kyiv, the ministry said in a separate statement, was in response to an attack on the Belgorod region of Russia.
Long aimed at limiting Moscow’s ability to strike Ukrainian cities, Kyiv’s attacks inside Russia have taken on added import in recent weeks. Ukraine’s forces have been struggling on the battlefield at home, and the coming inauguration of Donald J. Trump in Washington has raised questions about whether the United States will maintain military support for Kyiv.
Mr. Trump, who has publicly expressed doubt about continuing to assist Ukraine once he takes office on Monday, has said he will end the war swiftly, without specifying how.
Marc Santora and Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting.
