In the northern residential suburb of Vynohradar – a district of modest apartment blocks – residents were quietly and calmly getting on with salvaging, clearing and dealing with what remained of their apartments after Monday night’s massive missile attack on Kyiv. Dozens of rockets and hundreds of drones had been let loose on the city, leaving five people dead.

Residents’ possessions had avalanched out of one building, and lay in heaps at its base. Shattered glass lay in flowerbeds among the irises and roses. Locals came by clutching lengths of plastic sheeting to cover their blown-out windows – supplies were being handed out in the local aid point that had sprung up in a nearby school.

In UNIT.City, a new residential and office development near Babyn Yar – the memorial to Jewish victims of the second world war – the glazing of the modern glass-fronted blocks was almost entirely blown out and chestnut trees stripped of their leaves by the blast waves of missiles. Cars had been smashed and were strewn with fallen branches. Residents were heaving piles of broken glass and rubble to a skip and installing sheets of plywood where their windows had been.

The wave of attacks was launched against multiple Ukrainian cities, killing at least 12 people in Dnipro and six in Kyiv, and wounding 131 others. Ukrainian officials said Moscow had fired 73 missiles and 656 drones nationwide.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has escalated Moscow’s air campaign in recent weeks in an apparent attempt to take advantage of Ukraine’s shortage of US-made air defence systems – exacerbated by the Iran war – and convince an increasingly pessimistic audience at home that Moscow is prevailing in the four-year war. The Kremlin had previously threatened “systematic” strikes against Kyiv and urged foreign nationals to leave.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Tuesday called for more air defences for his country, calling the attack “an explicit statement by Russia”. He added that if Ukraine was “not protected from ballistic missiles and other missile strikes, those strikes will continue”.

Russia has been relentlessly attacking Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, since it launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. This was the third heavy assault on the capital in under a month, and Kyiv appeared to be main target. Kyiv’s defences stop most of Moscow’s drones, but it is still vulnerable to missiles. Thousands took shelter in the Kyiv subway system, some carrying pets, belongings and mattresses.

US-brokered talks on the war in Ukraine have stalled, but Russian advances on the battlefield have slowed, and Kyiv has stepped up its strikes on Russian oil refineries.