Overnight Russian barrage kills nine in Kyiv, as air defense struggle with U.S. continues
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- Russian forces struck Kyiv before dawn Saturday with 35 missiles and 185 attack drones, killing nine and injuring more than 30 across five districts of the capital.
- Zelenskyy reported Ukraine intercepted only 1 of 27 ballistic missiles, blaming dwindling Patriot supplies, and wrote that 'every package of ballistic missile interceptors saves the lives of our people.'
- The Darnytskyi district took the heaviest toll at seven dead and 14 injured, while crews pulled 35 residents from upper floors of a damaged five-story building in the Solomianskyi district, where two more died.
- Lithuania's foreign minister said his country's embassy in Kyiv sustained damage when missiles hit nearby, illustrating the attack's spillover onto a NATO member state's diplomatic compound.
- Zelenskyy said he emerged from Tuesday's White House meeting expecting a license for Ukraine to build its own Patriot missiles, but Trump told a Camp David Cabinet meeting Friday: 'we have not agreed to that.'
- Zelenskyy also reported Ukrainian drones struck three oil refineries overnight in Russia's Bashkortostan region, roughly 1,000 miles from the front lines, and that a sanctioned Russian container ship was sunk in the Black Sea.
- Rosatom, owner of the sunk vessel's operating subsidiary, told Reuters the ship had been carrying only frozen food and construction materials — a denial that sharply contests Ukraine's characterization of the strike.
Why it matters: Trump publicly reversed the Patriot tech-transfer plan Zelenskyy believed he secured Tuesday, telling his Cabinet 'we have not agreed to that' hours before Russia exploited Kyiv's interceptor shortage to kill nine civilians — the diplomatic timeline and the battlefield timeline are pulling in opposite directions, and the gap is measured in lives per night.
