Russia Fires 16 Ballistic Missiles at Ukraine; Kyiv Bridge Hit, 12 Injured

Russia launched 16 ballistic missiles and more than 280 drones at Ukraine overnight on 26-27 October, striking Kyiv, including the Pivdennyi (South) Bridge, and hitting energy, logistics and urban infrastructure across 10 regions, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on X.

The assault covered Kyiv, Vinnytsia, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Odesa, Chernihiv, Sumy, Donetsk, Kherson and Chernivtsi oblasts. Zelenskyy called it "a serious escalation in Russia's operation against our logistics" and said casualties resulted from hits in Kyiv.

Earlier, on the evening of 26 October, a strike on a university campus and its surroundings injured 12 people, five of them students and university staff, according to Zelenskyy. While emergency services worked at that site, ballistic missiles were fired again.

The overnight barrage used Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles along with 280 Shahed, Gerbera and Parodiya drones, with Kyiv the main target. As of 09:00 on 27 October, Ukrainian air defences had destroyed or jammed 257 of those assets: two ballistic missiles and 255 drones, early reports said.

Zelenskyy tied the scale of the strikes to air-defense supply delays, saying that "the artificial and prolonged delays in the delivery of interceptor packages for Patriot and NASAMS systems, which unfortunately have occurred recently, are directly helping Russia achieve the objectives of its terrorist campaign." On 26 October, he said Kyiv had waited nearly a month for US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to approve missiles for those systems and instructed his team to raise the matter again with the US side.

Russian forces used Iskander-M/S-400 missiles in the attack. Shahed drones in the assault included 69 jet-powered models, with 56 jet-powered among those shot down or jammed by 09:00 on 27 October.