When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy briefly spoke to each other at the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham on Tuesday, ahead of their separate meetings with President Donald Trump, the conversation was reportedly cordial. The men smiled and shook hands. The last time they had met in person was three years ago. No other meeting was arranged during their U.S. stay. According to an unnamed Israeli official, the two leaders spoke about drone technology: “We both share an issue, and that is drones.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar echoed this comment after his own conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart: “We discussed the challenges facing our nations, including the threat posed by Iran.” Three days earlier, Ukraine had sunk an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea.

So why the tepidness, then, despite this shared interest? The short answer is Israel’s delicate balancing act with Russia.

The mass immigration of post-Soviet Jews in the 1990s created a significant Russian-speaking electorate in Israel. Its votes were spread between several parties; its most explicit political vehicle was Natan Sharansky’s Yisrael BaAliyah, and, a few years later, the more nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu, founded by Avigdor Lieberman in 1999. Still, by the end of the decade, the new base had become capable of influencing roughly 15 seats in the Knesset. But the weight of this new constituency was not merely electoral. The post-Soviet immigration wave brought tens of thousands of engineers, scientists, physicians, and other highly trained professionals into an economy just beginning its transformation into a technology power. Tens of thousands of Soviet-trained engineers and technologists arrived during the 1990s, more than doubling Israel’s existing engineering workforce, even if many initially struggled to find work commensurate with their qualifications.

In the decades that followed, Jewish post-Soviet oligarchs, including Vladimir Gusinsky, Leonid Nevzlin, Mikhail Fridman, and Roman Abramovich, deepened those connections through residence, investment, philanthropy, and involvement in Israeli public life. The Soviet collapse had therefore tied Israel to the Russian-speaking world through votes, skills, capital, and personal networks before Vladimir Putin ever entered the Kremlin.

When Ariel Sharon became foreign minister in 1998, he treated that demographic transformation as a potential instrument of foreign policy: Israel’s large Russian-speaking population gave it a natural constituency for closer relations with Moscow. Sharon began advocating warmer ties before Putin had fully consolidated power. After becoming prime minister, Sharon visited Putin in Moscow in September 2001, where the two leaders emphasized a shared struggle against Islamic terrorism during the heights of the Second Intifada and the Second Chechen War.

The relationship crested under Benjamin Netanyahu, whose personal rapport with Putin was less one of friendship than of mutual professional respect between two men who intended to stay in power for a long time. Between Netanyahu’s 2009 return to office and his 2021 ouster, he met with Putin roughly 20 times, about twice as often as he met with any U.S. president, Israel’s most important ally.

The load-bearing structure underneath it all was Syria. When Russian forces entered the Syrian Civil War in 2015 to save the nearly toppled Assad regime, Moscow and Jerusalem quietly built a deconfliction line between their militaries: Russia would not interfere with Israeli strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah targets, and Israel would not treat Russian assets as fair game. “We don’t interfere with them and they don’t interfere with us,” as former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon put it. It held for the better part of a decade, surviving the accidental 2018 downing of a Russian aircraft by Syrian air defenses and years of routine Israeli airstrikes.

But it wasn’t Netanyahu’s rapport alone. His foreign minister and later defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan-born, Russian-speaking leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, pursued a Russia policy that was often warmer than Netanyahu’s. In 2011, he called Russia’s parliamentary elections “fair, free and democratic,” even as then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and international observers raised concerns about manipulation and ballot-box stuffing in favor of Putin’s party, United Russia. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Israel conspicuously failed to participate in the U.N. General Assembly vote affirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity and declaring the Crimean referendum invalid, an absence officially attributed to a strike by Israeli diplomats, but one that nonetheless spared Moscow an Israeli vote against it.

The two men were also, at times, competing for the same Russian-speaking constituency rather than working in tandem. In September 2019, days before an Israeli election, Lieberman mocked Netanyahu after reports emerged of Putin keeping him waiting for nearly three hours in Sochi. “In Russia, nothing is by happenstance,” he said. “Everything there is planned to the smallest detail.” He called Netanyahu’s visit “purely electoral,” suggesting the trip was a waste of government funds and an attempt to peel Russian-speaking voters away from Yisrael Beiteinu.

Alongside the military arrangement, Putin built a warmer register than pure realpolitik required. He often called Israel “a Russian-speaking state” and even told a Moscow audience in 2019 that “citizens of Russia and Israel are connected by ties of family, kinship and friendship. … Our nations are united by common and often tragic pages in history.” During a 2005 visit to Israel, Putin also reunited with his former German teacher, Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, a Jewish émigré living in Tel Aviv, and arranged for her to receive an apartment there, although later financial records showed that Roman Abramovich had supplied the purchase money. In 2012, he personally donated to and visited Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, a $50 million monument to Jewish life in Russia built with Chabad, and told its founding rabbi that its opening was “another step in quelling antisemitism in Russia.” At the museum’s opening, Shimon Peres praised Putin as a leader who “knows how to fight evil,” a judgment that would age with extraordinary irony.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should have forced a reckoning in Jerusalem. It never fully did, and the reasons revealed how transactional the Israeli-Russian relationship had remained. Israel condemned the invasion and, unlike after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, voted for the U.N. General Assembly resolution demanding that Moscow withdraw its forces. It supplied Ukraine with humanitarian aid and nonlethal protective equipment but resisted President Zelenskyy’s repeated appeals for weapons and air-defense systems. The policy was controversial at home: Israeli public opinion strongly favored Ukraine, and thousands of Israelis, many of them with roots in Ukraine, protested what they regarded as Jerusalem’s inadequate response, although the public remained divided over supplying weapons.

At first, Israel’s ambiguous position appeared to offer diplomatic leverage. On March 5, 2022, then Prime Minister Naftali Bennett flew secretly to Moscow to meet with Putin, then traveled to Berlin to brief German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Bennett had spoken with Zelenskyy beforehand and, over the following weeks, repeatedly communicated with both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, carrying messages between them rather than presenting a formal Israeli peace plan.

His shuttle diplomacy overlapped with, but remained distinct from, the direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations that began in Belarus, continued remotely, and culminated in talks under Turkish auspices in Istanbul. Bennett subsequently claimed that Putin had assured him he would not kill Zelenskyy and that Zelenskyy had shown a willingness to abandon Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership. He also suggested that the Western governments supporting Ukraine had preferred continued military pressure to the cease-fire he was attempting to broker, a remark later cited by those who accused Washington and London of blocking peace. But Bennett later qualified the stronger interpretation of his remarks: It remained uncertain whether an agreement was attainable or even desirable, and he said he had estimated the initiative’s chances of success at roughly 50-50. Contemporaneous Israeli and Ukrainian officials likewise stressed that no completed deal had been presented for Kyiv to accept, while the subsequent negotiations left major territorial, military, and security-guarantee questions unresolved.

Whether Bennett came as close to a breakthrough as he later implied remains disputed. What the episode demonstrated more clearly was the practical value Israel still derived from preserving access to Moscow. At the war’s outset, it was one of the few Western-aligned states whose prime minister could meet Putin in person, speak repeatedly with Zelenskyy, and plausibly present himself to both as an intermediary.

That access also imposed limits. Netanyahu later argued that Israeli weapons sent to Ukraine could be captured by Russian forces and transferred to Iran, allowing Tehran to study or reverse-engineer sensitive Israeli technology. In May 2022, Israel rejected an American request to permit Germany to transfer Israeli-licensed Spike antitank missiles to Ukraine. It also resisted proposals to send Kyiv U.S.-owned Iron Dome batteries.

Beneath these explanations lay the continuing constraint of Syria. Israeli officials feared that antagonizing Moscow could jeopardize the coordination mechanism that allowed the Israel Defense Forces to strike Iranian and Hezbollah targets without confronting Russian forces. Refusing to arm Ukraine was therefore not simply an expression of neutrality. It was the price Jerusalem believed it had to pay to preserve freedom of action closer to home.

Yet the Ukraine war was already eroding the logic behind that restraint. By the summer of 2022, after failing to achieve a rapid victory and expending large quantities of precision-guided weaponry, Moscow had turned to Tehran for attack drones. Russian officials visited an Iranian airfield twice to inspect weapons-capable systems; deliveries followed, and Iranian-designed Shaheds soon became a central component of Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. Iran, one of the powers Russia had previously attempted to balance in Syria, was becoming an increasingly important supplier to the Russian war effort.

At roughly the same time, Moscow began withdrawing or repositioning some personnel and equipment from Syria to meet the demands of the Ukraine front. In August 2022, satellite imagery indicated that Russia had removed an S-300 air-defense battery from Syria and shipped it toward the Black Sea, apparently to reinforce defenses closer to the Ukrainian theater. Russia did not abandon its principal Syrian bases, but reports of withdrawals and repositioning suggested that Iran and Hezbollah were seeking to fill some of the resulting gaps. The contradiction was becoming difficult to ignore: Israel was preserving its accommodation with Moscow partly because Russia could restrain Iran in Syria, even as Russia’s battlefield failures made it more dependent on Iranian weapons and less capable of performing that restraining role.

The community most exposed by this ambiguity was not in Jerusalem. When the invasion began, Russia’s core Jewish community still numbered roughly 155,000 people, along with a much larger population estimated at around 600,000 eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Three days after the invasion, Boruch Gorin, a senior spokesman for Russia’s Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities, wrote bluntly on Facebook, “Stop the war!” On March 2, Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar—nicknamed “Putin’s Rabbi,” given their close relationship—issued his own carefully worded appeal to “stop this madness to prevent future deaths.” Their statements were striking because Putin had spent two decades cultivating a tacit compact with Chabad: After 70 years in which the Soviet state had repressed religious life and sharply constrained Jewish practice, the Kremlin supported the rebuilding of Jewish institutions, while Chabad’s leaders generally avoided confronting the government.

By the summer of 2022, Moscow was pressuring the institutions connecting Russian Jews to Israel. Russia’s Justice Ministry asked a Moscow court to dissolve the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency, the organization responsible for facilitating aliyah. The case was formally framed around alleged violations of Russian privacy law, but it unfolded amid deteriorating relations with Israel and a growing exodus of Russian citizens. By July, nearly 20,000 immigrants had arrived in Israel from Russia since the invasion began, with similar numbers arriving from Ukraine. Then Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid initially warned that closing the agency would be “a grave event” with consequences for bilateral relations, then softened his language, emphasizing Israel’s readiness for dialogue while “maintaining the important relations between the countries.”

The same community Putin had long presented as evidence of his tolerance could now serve as leverage against Israel. In October, Alexei Pavlov, an assistant secretary of Russia’s Security Council, described Chabad as a supremacist cult in the state-owned newspaper Argumenty i Fakty. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev subsequently apologized, saying the remarks were erroneous, and stressed that they did not represent the council’s official position. Even so, the episode alarmed Russian Jewish leaders: Former Moscow chief rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt urged Jews who were able to leave Russia to do so, while Boruch Gorin warned that official antisemitism would mean “the end of a Jewish presence in Russia.”

Putin’s own rhetoric was shifting as well. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2023, he defended Russia’s absurd claim that it was fighting to “denazify” Ukraine by turning directly to Zelenskyy’s Jewish identity. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin said. “They say that Zelenskyy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.” Putin, who had spent two decades presenting himself as a protector of Russian Jews and a guardian of Holocaust memory, was now claiming the authority to distinguish authentic Jews from shameful ones and conscripting Jewish suffering into the ideological justification for his war.

After Oct. 7, the deterioration became even harder to disguise. Moscow blamed the conflict’s eruption largely on the failure of American policy and intensified its criticism of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the bombardment violated international law and risked producing a catastrophe lasting decades. Less than three weeks after the massacre, Russia hosted a Hamas delegation led by senior official Moussa Abu Marzouk in Moscow, prompting an angry Israeli protest that the Kremlin was sending “a message legitimizing terrorism against Israelis.”

Days later, an antisemitic mob stormed the airport in Russia’s Makhachkala, Dagestan, searching for rumored Jewish and Israeli passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv. Hundreds of men overran the terminal and runway, inspecting vehicles and demanding to see passengers’ documents. Putin condemned the violence only indirectly, blaming Ukrainian agents acting on behalf of Western intelligence services, without presenting evidence, rather than confronting the antisemitism animating the riot. The Kremlin did not organize the mob, and Russian authorities later prosecuted participants; by July 2025, Russian courts had sentenced 135 people in connection with the riot. But the episode exposed how quickly official anti-Western and anti-Israeli narratives could merge with older hatreds inside Russia itself.

By then, well over 40,000 Russian citizens eligible under the Law of Return had immigrated to Israel. Those who remained belonged to a community Moscow and Jerusalem had spent two decades treating as a strategic asset: evidence of Putin’s professed tolerance, and an electoral and demographic constituency in Israel.

However, the rupture did not happen. Israel preserved its access to Russia, while Moscow stopped short of severing relations with Jerusalem. But beneath that continuity, the arrangement was decaying. Russia was becoming more dependent on Iran, less capable of regulating Syria, more willing to pressure Jewish institutions, and increasingly prepared to align itself diplomatically and rhetorically against Israel. The relationship survived Ukraine and Oct. 7. The strategic logic that had sustained it did not.

Bashar al-Assad’s downfall in December 2024 removed much of the physical premise on which the relationship had been built. Russia sharply reduced its military presence and faced an uncertain future at its principal Syrian bases, losing much of the leverage it had exercised under Assad, even as it sought to retain access to Tartus and Hmeimim. Israel, freed from the same need to coordinate around a large and entrenched Russian deployment, moved into the Golan buffer zone for the first time since the 1974 disengagement agreement. The deconfliction arrangement that had structured a decade of Israeli-Russian contact had largely lost its operational purpose. The relationship was now held together by habit, a shared distaste for surprises, and neither government’s desire to be the one to end it formally.

The Iran wars of 2025 and 2026 became, in effect, a controlled experiment in what the relationship was worth to each side once little structural support remained. In June 2025, when Israel struck Iranian nuclear and military targets, Putin condemned the attacks as illegal and offered to mediate but provided no publicly visible military assistance to Tehran, and he called Netanyahu personally to discuss the crisis. Contemporary reporting described Moscow’s response as rhetorically forceful but materially limited.

In February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched a far larger war and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Putin’s language sharpened considerably, calling the killing a “cynical” murder carried out “in violation of all norms of human morality and international law.” But the basic pattern held: strong words, sustained diplomatic support for Iran and demands for an immediate cessation of hostilities, but no publicly announced deployment of Russian troops or major weapons transfers. Netanyahu, for his part, had told the Knesset months earlier that he still spoke with Putin “on a regular basis” and that their long-standing personal relationship “serves our vital interests.”

Iran had already confirmed its purchase of Russian Su-35 fighter jets in 2025. Now, unconfirmed reports indicate that Russia has completed an initial batch of up to 20 aircraft. If shipped, the transfer would represent a different order of military commitment from the drone cooperation that defined the wartime years, and perhaps would be the clearest signal yet that a Russia battered by its war in Ukraine is leaning harder into one of its remaining strategic partnerships rather than retreating from it.

Whether a cornered Moscow ultimately becomes more dependent on Tehran, and thus a subtler but more durable threat to Israel, or simply runs out of the capacity to make good on that dependence is now genuinely an open question, one this year’s fighting has done more to sharpen than to answer.

Anton was walking home with a friend in Kyiv when he was suddenly seized and forced into the back seat of a police car, with an officer on each side, heading towards a future that would likely see him in the trenches.

The 52-year-old, who requested to withhold his surname to protect his identity, has supported Ukraine’s fight against Russia, but did not want to be sent to the front line. The grinding attrition of war seemed like a death sentence given his health issues. He is HIV-positive and has arthritis and poor eyesight – conditions that he believed made him medically unfit to serve.

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But since mobilisation laws took effect in May 2024, Ukraine’s recruitment officers have been ambushing men on the street.

In late January, when he was allegedly captured, he had been avoiding venturing out of his apartment block – fearful of both Ukraine’s controversial conscription drive and Russian drone attacks on his neighbourhood.

But on one of the few times he did leave his home, the police jumped out of a car that was parked in a residential garage and chased him, he said.

He was then caught and driven to a militarised section of a state clinic in Kyiv, where his phone was confiscated.

“They told me to mute my phone and hand it over,” he said. “I started to protest. The guard said, ‘Don’t push me to use physical methods on you. Give it to me now.’ So I did.”

After undergoing medical tests, he was transferred to a military recruitment centre on the outskirts of the city, where he would spend two days in a room with barred windows, a bucket of cold pasta, and no way to contact the outside world.

What happened to Anton has a term in Ukraine – “busification” – men stopped on city streets, checked for exemption cards, and placed directly onto buses bound for mobilisation centres.

According to observers, as Ukraine’s conscription crisis grows, it is increasingly common.

On the streets, resistance against the recruitment officers has also turned physical, and on occasion, deadly.

Within the space of three days in February, a draft officer was shot dead at a petrol station in Poltava oblast, an explosion inside a draft office in Rivne killed one person and wounded six, and another blast wounded one at an enlistment office in Pavlohrad. Ukraine’s Security Service later said Russia had recruited the perpetrator of the Rivne bombing.

At the military recruitment centre, Anton watched on as young men arrived, freshly caught from the streets with stories to tell.

One man told him he had been seized hours earlier, as he prepared to drive his wife to hospital to give birth to their first child.

“There was a strong sense of solidarity,” he told Al Jazeera. “They shared their life stories and tried to offer advice and share their opinions, as well as their experiences of dealing with the guards.”

As recruitment officers began parcelling the men out to military units, Anton discovered that his HIV status had been withheld from the commanders they were being offered to – information that, once revealed, saw him deemed too unwell to serve.

He was eventually released, but said it cost him $5,000 in lawyers’ fees to walk free on a conditional summons, and a further $30,000 paid to fixers who promised to secure his documents and then vanished.

He is now confined to his home, afraid to step outside.

At the time of publishing, the Command of the Territorial Defence Forces had not responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

In the months following Russia’s full-scale invasion, initial battlefield successes and a wave of patriotism led to hundreds of thousands volunteering to serve, but after a failed counteroffensive in 2023, recruitment became difficult, and tactics hardened.

Two laws signed in April 2024 lowered the draft age from 27 to 25, quintupled fines for evasion, and dropped a promised provision that would have allowed soldiers to demobilise after 36 months of service, leaving those already fighting with no fixed end to their duty.

Men have reportedly been taken from a range of sites.

In October 2024, footage outside a concert at Kyiv’s Palace of Sports showed officers dragging a man across the pavement as onlookers chanted “Shame!”

In the western city of Uzhhorod, a man was rounded up as he left Sunday mass despite carrying papers proving he was the sole carer for his disabled mother.

Corruption in the recruitment process has been alleged. In some cases, men have obtained exemptions through paid-for medical diagnoses.

In October 2024, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin resigned after journalists reported that dozens of prosecutors in the western Khmelnytskyi region held disability status to avoid the draft.

The scandal proved to be the tip of the iceberg: Ukraine’s security service announced it had cancelled 4,106 fake disability certificates issued through corrupt medical examination commissions that year, charging 64 commission officials in the process.

Then, in January 2025, the chief psychiatrist of Ukraine’s armed forces – a senior member of the central military medical commission that decides whether conscripts are fit to serve – was arrested for illegal enrichment, having accumulated a house, apartments in Kyiv and Odesa, land, and four luxury cars worth more than $1m since the invasion began.

Investigators searching his home found $152,000 and 34,000 euros in cash.

‘Systematic and large-scale’

The alleged abuses have been documented internationally.

In a memorandum published on July 8, 2025, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights raised alarm over mobilisation practices, including beatings, harsh detentions, denial of access to lawyers, and the conscription of men with disabilities, citing Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, who had described the violations as “systematic and large-scale”.

This has affected public opinion.

According to a July 2025 survey by Ukraine’s Rating Group, only 24 percent of Ukrainians said they trusted enlistment officers.

Telegram groups began tracking recruiters in real time – a movement so popular that Google’s Threat Analysis Group identified a suspected Russian intelligence operation piggybacking on it in October 2024, creating a fake app that purported to map recruiters’ locations while secretly installing malware.

Attacks on recruitment officers

More than 600 attacks on enlistment officers have been recorded since the start of the war, with assaults nearly tripling in 2025.

The first four months of 2026 alone saw 117 – more than 20 times the five recorded in the war’s entire first year.

Anger has boiled over.

On July 8, 2026, a crowd in Lviv’s Sykhiv district blocked, damaged and overturned a recruitment service vehicle during the detention of a man wanted for draft evasion, prompting pre-trial investigations by the national police and the Security Service of Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has argued that the only beneficiary of such scenes is Russia.

Yet the condemnations have also been tempered with concessions by institutions like the Defence Ministry, which conceded that mobilisation methods need improvement.

Oleksandr Syrskii, who was sacked as the country’s commander-in-chief last month along with the defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, also acknowledged the army was working to correct mistakes and prevent rights violations at enlistment offices.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia pounded the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and the surrounding region with scores of missiles and drones in a nighttime aerial attack that lasted for hours and killed at least 16 people, officials said Thursday.

Moscow’s forces have in recent months 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.

Large-scale Russian missile strikes have become a regular occurrence this summer. Just over two weeks ago, a Russian attack on Kyiv and its surrounding region killed 17 people, and nine were killed in 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 has also unsettled the Russian public by striking warehouses of Wildberries, the country’s biggest online retailer.

Zelenskyy repeats his appeals for more air defense

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pleaded for countries to send more Patriot interceptors for defense, but international stockpiles are low amid the Iran war and Kyiv’s more than four-year fight against Russia’s all-out invasion.

Russia’s overnight barrage also included cruise missiles and jet-powered drones that further strain air defenses, Ukraine’s air force said.

Explosions boomed across Kyiv in the dark, but the air force said hits were recorded at 28 locations across the country. Emergency services said 15 people were killed in the capital, with another death in the wider Kyiv region. About 40 people were wounded, Zelenskyy said, as air raid warnings lasted until after dawn.

More than 38,000 people, including over 2,000 children, sheltered in Kyiv’s subway stations overnight, the system’s operator said.

“It was a massive attack,” Zelenskyy said on social media, adding that Russia “had been preparing (it) for a long time, combining different types of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, aiming to cause as much damage as possible to civilian infrastructure.”

The Russian Defense Ministry said it struck a Kyiv industrial site manufacturing components for Flamingo cruise missiles. Sites involved in the production and storage of drones, an ammunition depot and a logistics center were also hit, it said.

Russia is able to produce more than 200 cruise and ballistic missiles per month, Ukraine’s intelligence agency told news outlet Ukrainska Pravda in comments published Thursday. It has stockpiled more than 1,100 cruise missiles and about 130 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, as well as hundreds of missiles of other types, the agency was quoted as saying.

It was not possible to independently verify the report, and Russian officials do not routinely answer questions about the country’s arsenal.

Ukraine says it struck more Russian oil facilities

Russia and Ukraine have battered each other with drones and missiles as their armies struggle to gain the upper hand on the 1,250-kilometer (780-mile) front line.

Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces struck an oil refinery in Nizhnekamsk, in Russia’s Tatarstan region, starting a fire, and the Tamanneftegaz oil terminal in Volna, in Russia’s Krasnodar region, where there was also a blaze. Ukraine has hit both facilities in recent months as part of its campaign to disrupt Russia’s vital oil industry.

Tatarstan leader Rustam Minnikhanov confirmed there had been a “massive attack” in the region, state news agency Tass reported, citing his press service. Many of the drones targeted Nizhnekamsk’s Zakamsk economic area, disrupting production at industrial sites and damaging residential buildings, Tass quoted him as saying.

The Russian Defense Ministry said air defenses shot down 726 drones overnight over a number of Russian regions, annexed Crimea and the Black and Azov seas, in one of Ukraine’s biggest aerial attacks of the war.

Ukraine’s neighbors are on alert

Russia’s relentless onslaught has spooked other European countries, especially those bordering Ukraine, which fear spreading attacks from Moscow.

Amid the attack on Kyiv, the Polish Armed Forces Operational Command activated its military aviation operations, ground-based air defense systems and radar reconnaissance. Polish and other NATO military aircraft were deployed to monitor its airspace, Polish news agency PAP reported.

Romania’s Defense Ministry said an unidentified drone crashed and burned in an uninhabited area near the Ukrainian border. Two Spanish F-18 jets, deployed on a policing mission in Romania, were scrambled overnight to monitor a group of “air targets” near the border, the ministry said.

In addition, two Romanian F-16 fighter jets were deployed to destroy a naval drone seen near a major Black Sea gas project, Romania’s acting Defense Minister Radu Miruta said.

Moldova’s Defense Ministry also said its airspace was breached by at least one drone.

Russia “is increasingly testing the resolve of NATO and its partners, violating the sovereignty of neighboring states and deliberately expanding the risks posed by its war far beyond Ukraine,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on social media.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saw a broad threat to the European Union. “An escalating campaign of threats is underway, unsettling our citizens and seeking to divide our Union,” she said on X.

Explosions shatter windows and screams fill the air

Russia’s overnight strikes hit 12 locations across Kyiv’s Darnytskyi, Sviatoshynskyi and Solomianskyi districts, damaging 30 apartment blocks, a school, a children’s hospital and a kindergarten, Zelenskyy said.

Larysa Bondaruk, 60, sat on the ground, holding her cat, Chanel, which had been rescued by firefighters. With tears in her eyes, she said her neighbor’s grandson had been trapped by the rubble and died. Her apartment was badly damaged.

“A rocket hit the roof. It was incredibly loud. Immediately, debris and doors were blown out. There were columns of smoke, columns of fire, screams, crying and despair,” she said. “Two people were killed in our building, but the rescuers responded quickly and professionally. I am grateful to them for that.”

In Solomianskyi district, the top two floors of a nine-story residential building were destroyed and fires broke out on other floors. People were also trapped in two residential buildings and a school shelter.

___

AP reporters Vasilisa Stepanenko and Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Stephen McGrath in Leamington Spa, England, contributed.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Russian forces have launched ballistic missile attacks on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, killing at least 13 people and wounding 33, officials said.

Explosions rang out across several districts of Kyiv early on Thursday, shaking buildings and setting off car alarms, according to the Kyiv Independent, a Ukrainian news outlet.

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The blasts hit the Sviatoshynskyi, Solomianskyi and Shevchenkivskyi districts.

In the Solomianskyi district, a nine-storey residential building collapsed and caught fire following the attack, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram. He said a children’s hospital in the district was also damaged, with windows shattered and cars burning on the grounds.

“People are trapped” at another residential building, he continued, with parts of Sviatoshynskyi and Solomianskyi districts also without electricity.

Ukraine’s Emergency Services said at least 33 people were wounded in the “massive attack” on the capital, with fires breaking out in residential buildings and at warehouses.

It said rescuers were at the scene of the attacks and had retrieved at least two people from the rubble of collapsed buildings.

An attack in the Brovary district of the Kyiv region killed one person and wounded another, Kyiv region’s Governor Tymur Tkachenko said.

“One industrial facility has been damaged. All relevant services are on site, working to extinguish the fire,” Tkachenko added.

Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s Audrey MacAlpine said air alarms continued to sound in the city on Thursday morning.

“We know that two fuel industrial facilities were hit,” she said.

MacAlpine said Russia’s escalating missile attacks across Ukraine were causing growing concern as Ukraine faces a shortage of Patriot interceptor missiles. The lack of sufficient air defences will be “a problem when Russia begins to target energy infrastructure, sites that will keep the heat and electricity on this winter”, she said.

The attacks also prompted security responses in neighbouring NATO member states.

Poland’s military command said it had mobilised aircraft and activated air defences to protect its airspace, particularly in areas bordering Ukraine.

Romania’s Ministry of National Defence said radar systems detected aerial targets near the Ukrainian border overnight, prompting the scrambling of two Spanish jets deployed on NATO missions and a Romanian air force helicopter.

The ministry said a drone entered Romanian airspace near Galati before crashing in an unpopulated area in Tulcea county.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Ministry of Defence said it had shot down 726 Ukrainian UAVs between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning over several regions, as well as over the Black Sea and Sea of Azov.

New defence minister

The attacks came a day after Ukraine’s parliament confirmed Yevhenii Khmara as the country’s new defence minister. Lawmakers approved his appointment 312-2, well above the 226 votes needed.

Khmara is a career intelligence official who rose through the ranks of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). He previously led its Alpha special operations unit, whose personnel have reportedly been linked to Operation Spiderweb, last year’s drone attack deep inside Russian territory.

Addressing parliament before the vote, Khmara pledged to “do everything to defend Ukraine, to reduce Russia’s war potential as much as possible, and to force the enemy into a just peace”. Zelenskyy called the confirmation a sign that “Ukraine needs more strength. And it will have it.”

Not everyone was convinced, however. Opposition lawmaker Solomiia Bobrovska said pulling Khmara from intelligence work was “a mistake”, even while praising him personally.

Khmara’s confirmation fills the vacancy left by former Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. He was ousted in July after a public rupture with the armed forces commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, who was also replaced weeks later amid public pressure.

The rupture reverberated further when, a day before Khmara’s confirmation, Fedorov released a video calling for Ukraine to move towards holding elections, currently suspended under wartime law.

He argued that the country faces a “systemic crisis of governance”.

The political fallout spilled into the streets on Wednesday, as dozens of demonstrators rallied in Kyiv in support of Fedorov’s call.

“It’s like we are in a trap,” protester Emilia, who gave only her first name, told Al Jazeera. “Because we have not had any elections, so the members of parliament, the people who are in the executive branch of power, they understand that, ‘Hmm, I can sit here and do whatever I want.'”

Several others said they backed the idea of renewing the country’s leadership. But they were sceptical that a real vote could be held while the war continues.

Ukrainian law currently bars elections during wartime, and no major political figure has publicly pushed back on that since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.

Zelenskyy’s term ended in May 2024, but the country has postponed its presidential election while martial law remains in effect.

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