Yet Another Night of Shelling: Reporting from Kyiv

This time the nighttime alarm was genuinely serious. We woke up to explosions; the power was out. In the morning, they reported casualties. On November 14, almost every district of Kyiv came under fire.

“There had already been plenty of reconnaissance drones in the sky since yesterday; it was immediately clear that something would come during the night,” a local volunteer says. “The units that are supposed to shoot down drones and missiles have gotten lazy: they go out hunting only when the strikes on us have already begun.”

According to preliminary reports, six people were killed, and there are children among the nearly four dozen injured. Hundreds of people had to be evacuated.

“I was lucky last night: only debris fell onto my roof. I live in a 16-story building. But the building next to mine… I even shoved my wife off the bed. Wham, and I thought, thank God it didn’t hit the building. But then I went outside and saw that just one building over, it had flown right into an apartment—directly into the apartment. It was diving, heading straight for the target. If it had been shot down, it would have come in differently. But here, it went exactly for the target,” our driver recounts.

Around 430 drones and 18 missiles were launched overnight, with explosions reported in 22 different locations. Residential buildings, a hospital, the grounds of an embassy (later confirmed to be the Azerbaijani embassy), shops, and offices were damaged, according to officials.

Andriy’s mother and father were trapped under the rubble. They were 71 and 73. A few days earlier, they had come from their village—they wanted to spend the winter in the capital, where there is heating.

On the city’s left bank, a missile struck a nine-story apartment block. Four people are still being searched for under the rubble. In the emergency tents, a woman collapsed—her daughter and son-in-law lived in that building. There has been no news from them so far.

Fires also had to be extinguished that day in the Odesa, Kharkiv, and Cherkasy regions. The suburbs of Kyiv were hit as well, with reports of ten wounded, including a child.

We never managed to reach other districts—it was already dark, and a new air-raid alert had been declared.