Russia's Night Assault Kills Dozens Across Ukraine

Russia unleashed one of its largest aerial assaults of the war on Ukraine overnight into October 7, firing cruise and ballistic missiles with some 130 attack drones at eight regions; air defenses downed 161 of them, but 18 strikes got through. The deadliest hit a residential building in Pryluky, Chernihiv region, killing nine people, including three children, and wounding over 40. The night's nationwide toll reached at least 12 dead, among them an eight-year-old, with dozens more wounded. Kremenchuk lost two residents when an apartment block was struck, and in Kyiv two died in the Darnytskyi district as blasts also hit Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. President Zelensky called the barrage a deliberate "birthday gift" of destruction timed to Putin's birthday, and renewed his appeal for Patriot batteries and other air defenses. The attack landed just as Kyiv's European partners tightened the screws on Moscow: Hungary dropped its veto on Ukraine's EU accession talks, opening clusters on the internal market and competitiveness, while EU ambassadors readied roughly 1,650 new sanctions, the bloc's largest package yet against Russia's military-industrial complex, over half of it aimed at missile production. Far from the front, Houthi rebels in Yemen struck two airports in southern Saudi Arabia, damaging King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and Najran airports and wounding three people.