Kyiv Under Ballistic Attack: The Explosions Rang Out Before the Sirens, an Eleven-Year-Old Boy Among the Injured

Kyiv woke again amid explosions - and this time the sirens were late. According to local authorities, at least three explosions rang out before the air-raid alert even went off, which tells you everything about the speed of the weapon that hit the city.

The attack began around 3:39 in the morning. The city authorities' tally so far speaks of eight injured, among them an eleven-year-old boy, with four ending up in hospital. Fires and damage were recorded in at least four city districts - from a hit uninhabited building in one, to a three-storey building set ablaze in another and a damaged transformer station in a third.

According to Russian sources, the attack used missiles from the S-400 system, launched from the Bryansk region - five to seven projectiles at the capital. Ukrainian authorities confirmed a ballistic attack, but didn't specify whether it was that exact system. The detail that frightens is technical: the S-400 is primarily an anti-aircraft system, but when redirected at ground targets, its flight is so fast that the explosion arrives before the siren. In other words, there's no warning.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko confirmed the ballistic attack, while Ukrainian tracking channels reported that the missiles were spotted only once they were already closing in on their targets. This is a war in which technology cuts the seconds between life and death to a minimum - and those seconds are the difference between reaching a shelter or not.

For a reader in the Balkans, news like this hasn't been distant for a long time. Not because missiles fall here too, but because any conflict in which an eleven-year-old civilian ends up in hospital reminds us how thin the line is between peace and chaos - a line our region remembers from its own past.