Deaths mount, trauma sets in as Russia ramps up missile attacks on Ukraine

Kyiv, Ukraine – On the sunny morning of July 24, three Russian missiles whizzed towards Kyiv.

Ukraine’s air defence downed only one because of a dire, desperate lack of Western-made missile interceptors, and the other two struck a sports centre that hosted an exhibition of drones.

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The ear-popping, earth-shattering strikes wounded more than 100 people and killed 12, including Valentyna Savitska, a fair-haired, 32-year-old border security officer and mother of two.

“Their childhood is over; they lost their mum,” Savitska’s husband, Ihor Solovey, told Al Jazeera.

His son Vladyslav, 15, is now determined to join the military as “his choice is revenge, revenge for mum,” said Solovey, who heads the government-run Center for Strategic Communication that analyses and refutes Russian disinformation.

His daughter Polyna, 11, is still recuperating.

“Mum is unconditional love, mum is tenderness, mum is support. And [Polyna] already understands that she lost it all,” Solovey said. “Her psychologist says there’s a delayed stress, a scar for life.”

July became the Russia-Ukraine war’s deadliest month since May 2022 as Moscow launched 376 missiles, a sinister record compared with 288 in March and 192 in July 2025.

Russia also sent nearly 5,000 long- and short-range drones and hundreds of gliding guided bombs that collapsed entire buildings in front-line areas.

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Survivors often lose their houses and belongings.

One of the missiles exploded just metres away from Kateryna Babych’s two-bedroom apartment in central Kyiv on July 2, in what became the war’s largest and deadliest attack that left 31 dead and more than 100 wounded.

Within seconds, the blast turned her apartment building into a concrete mess. Broken windows and shockwave-disfigured doors were engulfed in the fire as suffocating smoke rose.

Babych, 47, said she was more worried about her son Dmitry, who got a concussion and had his meniscus torn after a wardrobe fell on him.

“He says nothing hurts, but he threw up after he pulled me out of my room, and then helped his neighbours open the doors that were blocked” by the shockwave, she told Al Jazeera hours after the attack, her words interrupted by the sound of broken plastic window frames that her neighbour threw off his balcony.

Observers blame the record number of attacks and casualties on United States President Donald Trump’s refusal to supply PAC 2 and PAC 3 missile interceptors for US-made Patriot air defence systems.

Each interceptor costs several million dollars, and only about 50 can be manufactured monthly at the Lockheed Martin factory in Arkansas.

The White House redirected the supplies to its Middle East allies following Washington’s and Israel’s attacks on Iran – and also decided to beef up its own strategic stash.

Kyiv only has a tenth of the interceptors it needs, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN on August 12.

Moscow plans to increase the number of missiles to 200 per attack, Robert Brovdi, Ukraine’s top drone commander, told The Associated Press news agency on August 10.

Russian missiles also pummel Ukraine’s main seaport, Odesa, nearly paralysing the shipment of Kyiv’s key exports – grain, vegetable oil and steel slabs.

Even Ukrainian servicemen stationed there do not know the real amount of damage Russia incurred on the port’s infrastructure – and discuss it with a trademark Odesa sense of humour.

“We’re like an honest wife, we’re the last to know about the husband’s infidelities,” Oleh, a military officer serving near the port, told Al Jazeera, withholding his last name in accordance with wartime protocol.

In response, Ukraine hit Russia’s ports, oil terminals and cargo ships in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk and the occupied ports on the Sea of Azov.

“The situation is paradoxical,” analyst Fesenko said. “Both sides blocked each other’s grain exports, creating huge problems.”

The mutual blockade, coupled with droughts and heatwaves in the Northern Hemisphere, raised year-to-year wheat prices 30 percent in early August.

The suspension of exports will mostly affect Middle East nations such as Egypt, Lebanon and Sudan that cannot immediately find a new source of wheat.

On Thursday, Putin rejected a Kyiv-proposed moratorium on hostilities in the Black Sea.

“The problem is that Moscow actually doesn’t care about the problems of farmers” in southwestern Russia, Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

“The grain they won’t have exported will feed cattle in Russia, large agricultural holdings will get government credits to buy the bankrupt farms, and some farmers will get compensations and loans for a new sowing season,” he said.