What did the attacks of 23–24 May 2026 show?
A look back at the strikes on Kyiv and on Russian oil infrastructure in the days before 25 May 2026.
What was the picture as 25 May 2026 began? The days immediately before it were marked by an exchange of strikes, with civilians in Kyiv bearing the cost of one of them.
On 24 May, a Russian missile and drone attack hit Kyiv. Four people were killed and more than a hundred were injured. Several buildings were damaged, among them the National Chernobyl Museum, which was severely affected.
The same day, the Ukrainian Security Service reported that Ukrainian forces had carried out an overnight drone strike on the Vtorovo oil pumping station in Russia's Vladimir Oblast.
A day earlier, on 23 May, a Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at a Transneft oil terminal in Novorossiysk, in Krasnodar Krai.
Taken together, the reports from those two days described a war in which both sides were striking far from the front line: Russian missiles and drones landing on the Ukrainian capital, and Ukrainian drones reaching oil facilities in Russia, in one case in a region of Vladimir Oblast and in another on the Black Sea coast of Krasnodar Krai.
For readers assessing public life in Ukraine, the Kyiv casualty count and the damage to a museum were the clearest measures of the toll on the capital as the new week began.
