Russian strikes hit at least ten Ukrainian regions overnight into Tuesday, killing at least 12 people and wounding dozens more, in an attack President Volodymyr Zelensky said involved North Korean ballistic missiles alongside Russian Zircon anti-ship missiles and guided glide bombs.
The southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia was hit hardest, with six people killed and at least 19 wounded, including employees of the Zaporizhstal steel plant killed while running for shelter, according to Ukrainian officials. Six more people died in strikes on the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions. In Kyiv, Zelensky said an infectious-diseases hospital was damaged and fires broke out across the capital; strikes on the frontline cities of Kherson and Kharkiv knocked out power to parts of both. Sumy, Odesa, Chernihiv, Poltava and Mykolaiv regions were also targeted in the broader barrage, Ukrainian officials said, in what Zelensky called an attack "calculated to inflict maximum damage specifically on civilian infrastructure."
The claim that Pyongyang-made missiles were used marks an escalation Zelensky has been warning about for days. "Every step Russia takes — increasing ballistic missile production, bringing in North Korean equipment, preparing for mobilisation — all of this shows that Moscow is preparing not for peace, but for escalation," Zelensky said. Days earlier, he wrote on social media that Russia had decided to deploy 30,000 to 50,000 North Korean troops onto Russian territory to fight alongside Moscow's forces, deepening a military partnership that has already supplied Russia with artillery shells and short-range missiles over the past two years.
Ground shifts and Ukrainian counterstrikes
On the ground, Russian forces claimed further small advances Tuesday, taking the settlements of Vodyanoye and Novoye Pole in the Zaporizhzhia sector and Shcherbakovka along the Kharkiv axis, according to open-source front-line trackers. None of the claims has been independently verified by Ukraine's General Staff, which has previously disputed similar Russian battlefield announcements.
Ukraine, meanwhile, continued its own long-range campaign against Russian energy infrastructure, striking oil refineries deep inside Russian territory in recent days, including facilities in Saratov and the Slavneft-Yanos refinery in Yaroslavl, part of a sustained drone campaign that has repeatedly forced refinery shutdowns and contributed to regional fuel shortages inside Russia over the past year. A Ukrainian drone strike on Russia's Voronezh region overnight killed one person and injured two, regional officials said, damage Kyiv has not directly claimed.
Ukrainian officials say the overnight barrage and the alleged North Korean missiles underscore why Kyiv continues to press Western partners for more air-defense interceptors ahead of what officials on both sides expect to be a harder autumn on the battlefield, even as intermittent, so-far inconclusive diplomatic contacts over a broader ceasefire continue in the background.
