From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / October 23, 2025
A jet-driven strike leveled a Kharkiv preschool as 400+ drones battered cities, U.S. sanctions finally hit Rosneft and Lukoil, and Moscow answered diplomacy with a nuclear show.
The Day’s Reckoning
October 22, 2025—the 1,337th day of Russia’s full-scale invasion—began before dawn with the sound of sirens rolling across Kyiv’s empty streets. Within minutes, the sky filled with the whine of engines as Russia unleashed one of the largest air assaults of the war—hundreds of drones and missiles fired in waves meant to overwhelm every layer of Ukraine’s defenses. By sunrise, the smoke of burning substations and apartment blocks rose from Kyiv to Odesa. Six civilians were dead, among them a six-month-old baby and a twelve-year-old girl.
But the destruction from the sky was only half the story. In Washington, after months of hesitation, President Donald Trump finally imposed sweeping sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil—the twin engines of Russia’s oil empire. In the same breath, his long-planned peace summit with Vladimir Putin collapsed, undone by the Kremlin’s refusal to yield an inch from its maximalist demands. Moscow’s answer was theatrical: a full nuclear-forces exercise featuring intercontinental launches and submarine tests, staged to remind the world that it still had levers of fear.
And then, amid all the geopolitics and spectacle, came the image that froze the day in moral clarity: a kindergarten in Kharkiv struck by drones in broad daylight. Forty-eight children and their teachers crouched in a basement as the building above them disintegrated. One man was killed nearby. The children lived. Russia’s war for “de-Nazification” had found its newest target—a preschool.
The Night of 400 Drones
The first hums came low and far off, like distant generators. Then the sky erupted. Kyiv’s night turned to chaos as hundreds of drones poured in from every direction, their engines screaming through the wind. The air defenses answered in flashes of white light and thunderclaps that rolled through the city’s concrete valleys.
In an apartment corridor, Halyna Sharii sat clutching her blanket as dust rained from the ceiling. “I thought our building was falling,” she said later. “But it was the one next door.” A few blocks away, Ira Lukiants stepped into the hallway of her ninth-floor flat, barefoot and trembling, the air thick with plaster dust. “You don’t think, you just wait,” she said. “Then you’re still alive—and the fear catches up after.”
By dawn, the sky was gray with smoke. Two people dead in Kyiv, twenty-nine wounded, five of them children. East of the city, firefighters pulled the remains of a young family from the wreckage of their home—a mother, father, baby, and twelve-year-old girl who had tried to hide together.
Emergency crews worked through the morning restoring power as air-raid sirens faded. “Another night proving that Russia is not feeling enough pressure,” Zelensky said, as engineers fought to bring electricity back to the capital. Above the Danube, NATO jets lifted off to track what was left of the swarm. The war’s edges had widened again, and the sound of those engines carried farther than ever before.
Voice of Ukraine 