Ukraine has shown reporters fragments of the missile it says hit a key government building in Kyiv this weekend, identifying it as a Russian Iskander cruise missile.
Officials here now believe the building was struck deliberately in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Vladimir Putin’s response to Donald Trump’s peace efforts has been a clear escalation in Russian attacks.
But they don’t only target the Ukrainian capital.
In the eastern Donbas region, more than 20 civilians were killed by a Russian glide bomb on Tuesday as they queued to collect their pensions.
Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the strike on the village of Yarova as “savage” and called once again on Ukraine’s allies to increase the pressure on Moscow through sanctions.
His office said some US and European weapons components are still reaching Russia, including for the Iskander missile. Moscow has already substituted the rest with its own production.
“Strong actions are needed to make Russia stop bringing death,” Ukraine’s president wrote.
Our team was filming on Sunday morning during the air raid on central Kyiv and captured the moment the cabinet of ministers was hit. The images appear to show a direct strike: a missile suddenly arcs downwards, right before the explosion.
There is no indication of it being intercepted by air defences.
When we were allowed into the vast, Soviet-era building to see the damage, the smell of burning intensified as we climbed towards the top floor.
The roof and part of the walls in the damaged area have been blown apart and there’s a gaping hole in the floor.
All around, severed cables dangle from what remains of any ceiling.
The missile – packed with more than 100kg (220lb) of explosives – did not detonate, so the damage is limited to three floors. But it’s still significant.
We saw fragments of that missile, now being collected as evidence: mangled metal pieces, some with Cyrillic lettering on them, gathered in a heap.
Weapons experts we’ve consulted agree that it looks like a Russian cruise missile and say the damage is consistent with an Iskander striking but not exploding.
“Sometimes fuses do not work and missiles just don’t detonate. [It] can happen with a lot of different systems,” Fabian Hinz, a missile and drone expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Berlin, told me.
“I think it hit the building,” military analyst Oleksandr Musiienko confirmed here in Kyiv.
“This missile has a high speed and low altitude. It’s really hard to see on the radar. And of course, we do not have still enough air defence systems like the [American] Patriots, for example, which we can use to shoot them down.”
In Kyiv, the increase in early morning attacks is obvious: they’ve grown more frequent – but most importantly they’re bigger in scale. Russia now launches hundreds of drones at a time, deliberately draining Ukraine’s resources.
That’s why Zelensky is constantly calling for more missiles: to someone far from Kyiv it might sound like he’s stuck on repeat. But for people here it might be the difference between life and death.
Russia’s strikes are not only symbolic, on empty government buildings. They regularly hit people’s homes, too, as we saw again this week.
“Sometimes a lot of these drones are decoys – without explosives – just to weaken our air defence systems,” Mr Musiienko explained.
“We have never seen such attacks ever in our history. Of course, it’s a threat.”
Closer to the front line, the tactics are different: deadly glide bombs arrive almost without warning.
In Yarova, those killed this time were elderly. They’re the people who are most reluctant or least able to leave their homes, even as the fighting moves close again. The village was occupied by the Russians at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, then liberated later by Ukrainian troops.
At least 24 people who survived all that are now dead.
Images from the scene show their bodies sprawled on the ground and a smashed-up post office van that had been delivering the pensions. It parked under a tree for cover, hoping not to be seen – but the bomb hit anyway.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called it a “barbaric” strike by Russia and a “heinous crime” against the very people and region Putin claimed needed saving when he ordered the invasion.
“We urge the world to speak out and act immediately,” Sybiha said.
But Ukraine wants more than condemnation. It’s still calling for action against the Russian economy and the defence sector there.
An adviser to President Zelensky, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, told me the sanctions imposed so far were making a difference.
Ukrainian teams have been examining the remains of the missiles and drones launched by Russia since 2022, he said, and the percentage of Western-made components has shrunk.
But it still hasn’t been eliminated.
“There are less Western parts, that is good,” Mr Vlasiuk explained. “But the bad thing is that the number of Russian parts has increased which means Russia is producing things they couldn’t do before, including microchips.”
Increased co-operation with China in producing the drones was also making them far harder to jam, he said.
That may be what enabled Russia to hit the main government building in Kyiv for the first time – in the most tightly-guarded quarter of this city.
“It’s scary that they’re hitting the centre,” Alyona said on Tuesday, pushing her baby in a pram not far from the cabinet of ministers.
“There have always been drones here,” her husband added. “It’s just they used to fly overhead, and now they can hit.”
