Russian ballistic missile strike kills 14 in Kyiv region

In the hours before dawn on a Wednesday in August, Russian ballistic missiles fell across seven sites in the Kyiv region, killing at least fourteen people and wounding twenty-seven more — a strike that is neither the first nor, by all signs, the last in a conflict now entering its fifth year. The United Nations has recorded civilian casualties at their highest levels since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, a grim arithmetic that transforms policy debates about air defense systems into questions of immediate survival. Ukraine's appeals for more Patriot interceptors and the right t