New Delhi, July 3 -- Volodymyr Zelenskyy was standing alongside Ireland's taoiseach in Dublin on Wednesday evening when Ukrainian intelligence made the picture clear enough to say out loud. "We know that Putin has been preparing a massive strike against Ukraine for some time," he told reporters. "That is exactly the threat we are facing tonight." By the time his plane touched down in Kyiv on Thursday morning, at least 22 of his citizens were dead.

a nine-story apartment building with 64 units destroyed, an ambulance dispatch station, a scientific research institute, a hotel, commercial businesses, and the BookChef publishing warehouse, where an estimated 800,000 books burned.

Serhii Budko, a 24-year-old Kyiv resident, spent those hours ...