Ukraine Says Air Defenses Shot Down 642 of 729 Missiles and Drones in Overnight Strike on Kyiv

Ukraine’s General Staff said Russia launched one of the largest combined overnight air attacks of the war into June 2, with Kyiv as the main target, and that Ukrainian air defenses had shot down or suppressed 642 of 729 detected aerial weapons in preliminary figures released Monday morning.

In a Telegram update, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said the attack began at 6 p.m. on June 1 and continued overnight into June 2. It described the barrage as a combined strike of missiles and drones aimed primarily at the capital, while also reporting attacks on Dnipro, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, the Poltava region and other areas.

Ukraine’s military said radar tracked 729 aerial attack weapons in total: 73 missiles and 656 unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. The missile salvo, according to the Ukrainian military, included 8 Zircon missiles, 33 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 27 Kh-101 cruise missiles and 5 Kalibr cruise missiles, underscoring the mix of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and mass drone waves that Russia has repeatedly used in large-scale strikes.

As of 8:30 a.m. local time, the General Staff said air defenses had “shot down/suppressed” 642 targets — 40 missiles and 602 UAVs. It said the intercepted missiles included 11 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 26 Kh-101 cruise missiles and 3 Kalibr cruise missiles. In the same preliminary update, the military said 30 ballistic missiles, 3 cruise missiles and 33 attack drones hit 38 locations, while debris from downed drones fell in 15 locations. The attack was still ongoing at the time of the update, it added, with several drones remaining in Ukrainian airspace.

Local officials in Kyiv and Ukrainian media reported civilian casualties, fires and damage to buildings following the attack, as well as power interruptions in parts of the city. Authorities described injuries and at least one reported death, but casualty figures were still changing through the morning. The reports pointed to the immediate strain on the capital as air defenses responded to one of the heaviest overnight barrages reported by Ukraine in recent months.

Large Russian strikes in 2025 and 2026 have frequently combined missiles launched from different platforms with large numbers of drones, a tactic that forces Ukraine to defend against multiple types of threats at once across several regions. In this case, however, all detailed counts remained preliminary Ukrainian military claims from the morning after the strike. The full inventory and interception totals had not been independently verified at the time checked, and no corresponding statement from Russia’s Defense Ministry was immediately available.