Russian attacks on Ukraine kill 2 people a day after deadly shopping mall drone strike

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — At least two people were killed overnight in Ukraine by Russian drone and missile strikes, authorities said, a day after an attack on a shopping center killed 16 people.

Oleksandr Pertsovsky, the head of Ukraine’s national rail operator Ukrzaliznytsia, said Saturday that one of the company’s employees was killed in an overnight ballistic missile attack on the railway in the capital Kyiv.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said Saturday its forces had hit a locomotive depot.

Moscow’s forces have recently intensified their ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv, exploiting Ukraine’s chronic shortage of U.S.-made Patriot air defense interceptors, the sole weapon in its arsenal able to shoot down the missiles.

Russian drone strikes also killed one person overnight in Zaporizhzhia, local officials said Saturday.

The latest attacks came a day after Russian drones struck a shopping center in the city of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine on Friday.

Dnipropetrovsk regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said in the early hours of Saturday that the death toll had risen to 16 and nine people remain missing after the attack, which wounded another 130.

Kryvyi Rih is the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who described the attack as a double-tap strike, in which an initial wave of drones hit the area followed by a second wave as rescue workers responded.

Kryvyi Rih has been hit multiple times during the more than 4-year-old war, with one of the deadliest occurring in April 2025, when 20 people were killed, including nine children.

Large-scale Russian strikes have become a regular occurrence this summer, with Friday’s attacks landing just 24 hours after Russia pounded Kyiv with scores of missiles and drones in a nighttime assault that killed 16 people.

The capital has been hit hard repeatedly in recent weeks: 17 people were killed in a strike on Kyiv and its surrounding region just over two weeks ago, and nine died in another attack on the city two days before that. The United Nations said last week that Kyiv was one of the hardest-hit cities in July, with at least 54 civilians killed and 202 injured.

At the same time, Ukraine has shifted the war onto Russian soil through long-range drone strikes on oil facilities that have caused fuel shortages across the country. It also has unsettled the Russian public by striking warehouses of Wildberries, the country’s biggest online retailer.