Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is heading into a two-day NATO summit in Ankara this week with an urgent request for more interceptor missiles to protect Ukrainian cities, after Russia launched its second major missile and drone barrage on Kyiv in less than a week.
Russian missiles and drones struck Kyiv early this week, killing at least 24 people and wounding more than 100, according to Ukrainian officials one of the second attacks on the capital in a week and one of the deadliest of the year.
At least two more people, including a teenage girl, were killed in a separate strike on Zaporizhzhia. Russia fired roughly 68 missiles, many of them ballistic, along with over 350 attack drones, according to Zelensky.
Zelensky said Ukraine’s defenses were able to intercept most of the drones and cruise missiles but lacked sufficient means to stop the ballistic missiles, which caused the bulk of the damage.
He called it absurd that the means to protect civilians from what he described as ballistic terror still had not been sufficiently developed or supplied.
The attack came just days after a separate Russian strike killed more than 30 people in Kyiv described by the city’s mayor as the most severe assault on the capital to date and after Zelensky had publicly warned that Russian intelligence signals pointed to another major strike being prepared, timed around the U.S. Independence Day holiday and the run-up to the NATO summit.
At the Ankara summit, Zelensky is expected to press allies particularly the United States to speed up deliveries of interceptor missiles for Patriot air defence batteries, the system considered most capable of shooting down fast-moving ballistic missiles. Ukraine has grown increasingly effective at intercepting slower-moving drones and cruise missiles, but officials and analysts describe ballistic missile defence as its principal vulnerability.
Zelensky has argued that Ukraine’s own long-range strikes on Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure including a recent strike roughly 2,500 kilometers into Russian territory are putting real economic pressure on Moscow, and that sustained Western support could help push Russia toward genuine negotiations.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha likewise urged NATO leaders to prioritize Ukraine’s air defences following the Monday strikes.
The summit also comes amid renewed diplomatic activity between Washington and Moscow. U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to meet Zelensky in Ankara and is separately set to speak by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he held a 90-minute call over the weekend.
Trump has said he sees a real prospect of ending the war, though he has also questioned the current scale of U.S. support for NATO, and it remains unclear how much new material aid as opposed to diplomatic pressure will emerge from the summit.
Russia’s Defense Ministry has characterized its recent strikes as retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory, and separately claimed to have repelled a large Ukrainian drone attack on the night before the Kyiv strikes. Moscow’s account of events has not been independently verified.
