Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged US President Donald Trump to strengthen economic pressure on Russia after a wave of overnight strikes left around 600,000 people without power across Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

According to a Telegram post carrying Zelensky's name and dated 14 October, power installations and infrastructure sites in Kyiv, its surrounding oblast, and Kharkiv came under a coordinated aerial campaign involving 39 ballistic missiles along with more than 120 drones and loitering munitions.

Zelensky characterised the attack on Ukraine's power infrastructure as intentional, adding that its breadth indicated Moscow had not been deterred by calls from Washington for a halt to hostilities. He called on the United States and other nations to take concrete action in response, stating that statements from the president had not been treated as carrying sufficient weight by the Russian side.

Zelensky pointed to legislation put forward by US Senator Lindsey Graham as containing the tools needed to tighten pressure on Moscow, and called on Trump to deploy those provisions through robust sanctions against Russia. He also called for additional interceptor missiles to strengthen Ukraine's Patriot air defence systems, contending that durable peace depends on a country maintaining robust defensive capabilities — a position that has drawn comparisons to the doctrine associated with former US President Ronald Reagan.

Repair teams were on the ground addressing the infrastructure damage, the president noted, while also indicating that households and businesses should be prepared for additional interruptions to electricity supply. The statement placed responsibility for harm across 26 nodes within Ukraine's electricity network and four installations tied to oil and gas operations. Casualty figures and injury tallies were mentioned but left unspecified.

Ukraine's Air Force reported that the assault got under way at 6 p.m. on 13 October, with a total of 167 aerial weapons deployed — among them 39 missiles alongside 128 attack drones spanning several different categories. Among the ordnance catalogued were the Iskander-M ballistic system, the North Korean-origin KN-23, surface-to-air S-400 hardware, and the Zircon and Onyx strike variants. Among the projectiles catalogued were 77 jet-propelled units of the Shahed family, alongside craft designated as Banderol, Dan-T, Gerbera, Italmas, and Parodiya variants.

According to a statement from the Air Force, the defence effort drew on a combination of aviation assets, anti-aircraft missile units, electronic warfare systems, unmanned aerial platforms, and mobile fire groups working in coordination to push back the attack. By 9 a.m. on 14 October, a combined total of 119 aerial threats — four missiles alongside 115 drones — had been either brought down or neutralised by Ukrainian air defence units. Of the unmanned aircraft brought down, 59 were powered by jet propulsion.

Strikes from missiles and drones left their mark at 22 separate sites, with wreckage from targets brought down by interceptors coming to ground at an additional eight locations, according to the Air Force. A portion of the missiles launched did not strike the locations they were aimed at.

Three people were killed and 21 others wounded — one of them an eight-year-old child — after ballistic missiles struck a nine-storey apartment building and the CHP-4 power plant in Kyiv during the night of 13 October, Ukrainian officials reported. Fires broke out across multiple neighbourhoods after the strike reached the capital at roughly 10:40 p.m.

Fire moved through eight floors of residential accommodation in the Desnianskyi district before response teams brought the situation under control. Two bodies were pulled from the rubble of the building as 16 residents were brought to safety, while separate attacks set off fires and left casualties across the Holosiivskyi, Dniprovskyi, Darnytskyi, and Shevchenkivskyi districts.

Zelensky indicated that CHP-4 had been among the intended targets, adding that for the second night running, Ukraine's Western partners had provided no advance notice of the incoming ballistic missiles. No alert had passed through standard notification channels, the Ukrainian Air Force noted, while Dmytro Lytvyn — serving as a presidential adviser — indicated that both military and intelligence bodies had opened inquiries into why those notifications went undelivered.

Trump pushed back on claims that intelligence-sharing with Ukraine had been suspended, telling reporters the flow of information between the two sides remained active. No account had been given by the administration for why advance missile alerts went unissued to Ukraine across two consecutive nights. On 13 October, a reporter from a prominent broadcast outlet posed a question to White House press secretary Katie Zacharia about whether intelligence sharing with Kyiv had been halted, and she indicated that an answer would need to follow at a later point.