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.
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.
If Washington “sells us 5 percent [of its current missile stash], we will go through the winter and save people’s lives. If they can sell us 10 percent, we will destroy all the Russians’ ballistic missiles,” Zelenskyy said.
The Russian attacks mostly targeted residential areas and retaliated against Ukraine’s campaign to strike oil refineries, fuel depots, warehouses storing dual-purpose goods, and transport hubs from the Baltic to western Siberia.
All Kyiv can do these days is appeal to 40 countries to supply interceptors in return for future deliveries already planned for Ukraine.
“It’s hard to get them from country to country; in some countries they are about to expire, so they sell us some,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera. “The matter is not only about the missiles; we also need crews to serve the Patriots that Trump promised us, 17 or 18 of them, but we haven’t seen them yet.”
Russia ‘cynically, violently’ using its advantage
Apart from a chance to down Russian missiles mid-flight, Ukraine also needs to preemptively destroy Moscow’s ballistic potential by hitting the manufacturing chain.
But Washington refuses to supply Kyiv with AIM 120-Amraam active seeker missiles, Romanenko said.
Meanwhile, Russian plants work in shifts and exceed their production targets to churn out record amounts of ballistic and cruise missiles – up to 300 a month.
The attacks give Russian President Vladimir Putin an “illusion” of his imminent victory, according to Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank.
“Russia has an advantage, and Russia is using this advantage, using it cynically, violently,” he told Al Jazeera. “It creates a disbalance, and the situation is keeping us far from any real peace talks.”
Putin has repeatedly rejected the resumption of peace talks.
“These days, Putin has an illusion that he can win this war because Ukraine has a huge deficit of interceptor missiles,” Fesenko said.
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.
