Nine people were killed and more than 30 injured when Russia struck Kyiv overnight on Aug. 1, in an attack Ukraine's Air Force said involved 35 missiles, 27 of them ballistic, alongside 185 Shahed-type drones. [1] Rescue crews pulled 105 people from damaged buildings. [1] Of the ballistic missiles, exactly one was shot down.
"Only one ballistic missile was shot down tonight simply because there are no missiles for the Patriots," President Volodymyr Zelensky said. [1]
The barrage capped Russia's heaviest month of missile fire in the war. Ukrainian air force data analyzed by ABC News counted 381 missiles of all types launched in July, a rate of just over 12 a day and a wartime record for both scale and pace. [2] A separate AFP analysis of the same air force figures put the July total at 376, more than double the number fired in June. [3] The two counts differ; the trajectory does not.
Only the U.S.-made Patriot system can reliably intercept ballistic missiles, and Ukraine's interceptor stockpile is effectively spent. That shortage is now colliding with a reversal in Washington. Hours before the Aug. 1 strike, President Donald Trump walked back his pledge to grant Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot missiles, telling reporters, "We have not agreed to that. We're talking about it, but it's a hard thing to give away that kind of technology." [4] This outlet tracked that walk-back when it first landed; the license would let Kyiv manufacture the one weapon that can stop what is killing its civilians. [4]
Ukraine has answered by reaching deep into Russian territory. Its drones struck three Bashneft refineries at Ufa, the Saratov refinery, and the Lyudinovskaya oil depot in Kaluga Oblast, hit the Engels air base that houses Russia's Tu-95 and Tu-160 strategic bombers, and sank the Russian-flagged cargo ship Yanina in the Black Sea. [1]
The exchange exposes the asymmetry at the center of the war's fourth summer. Russia can mass-produce ballistic missiles and now fires them at a record clip; Ukraine can burn Russian refineries but cannot yet shield Kyiv's apartment blocks, because the interceptors that would do it are made in America and rationed by American politics. The people paying that bill are counted in the casualty lists: nine dead in a single night, 105 more pulled from the rubble. [1]
