Russian missiles strike US electronics plant in western Ukraine

Daryna Krasnolutska, Bloomberg News on Aug 21, 2025

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Russia attacked a civilian factory in western Ukraine owned by U.S. company Flex Ltd, causing a massive fire and wounding at least 19 people.

Local authorities said that at around 4:40 a.m. local time, two Russian cruise missiles hit the company’s premises in Mukachevo.

“It was a regular civilian business, supported by American investment, producing everyday items like coffee machines,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday on social media.

Russia resumed massive strikes deep inside Ukraine after a three-week pause ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s summit with Donald Trump in Alaska on Aug. 15. Following that meeting, the U.S. president backed down from his threats to increase penalties on Moscow unless it ceases its full-scale invasion.

The president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, Andy Hunder, said Russia “continues to destroy and humiliate U.S. businesses in Ukraine,” targeting firms traded in the U.S.

“We are calling on President Donald J. Trump to stand with American business in Ukraine,” Hunder said in a statement on social-media platform X. He called on the U.S. leader to “show Putin that the United States protects its own.”

European leaders and Zelenskyy visited Washington on Monday as Trump continues his bid to broker an end to Russia’s war, now well into its fourth year. The U.S. president is pushing for a bilateral meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin by the end of the month, as Kyiv’s European allies and Washington discuss security guarantees for Ukraine.

“The Russians carried out this attack as if nothing has changed at all, as if there are no global efforts to stop this war,” Zelenskyy said, pointing to the strike on Mukachevo as evidence that more pressure is needed to force Russia to hold “substantive negotiations.”

In a Facebook post on Thursday, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said that she had been impressed by the plant’s technology when she visited a year ago, adding that Ukrainian-made consumer electronics could now be found worldwide.

“Thanks to the detailed measures for responding to air alarms, all 600 workers who were on shift at the time made it to the shelter in time — this saved lives, not a single person died,” she wrote.

Flex, traded in the U.S., is one of the world’s leading electronics manufacturing services companies, with factories in 30 countries. Its Mukachevo plant opened in 2012 and employs thousands, local authorities said.

“This is not the first Russian attack on American businesses in Ukraine, after strikes on Boeing offices in Kyiv earlier this year and other attacks,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in a post on X.

The strike was the first on the city since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Mukachevo is located in Ukraine’s westernmost region of Zakarpattya, around 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the Russian border and just 40 kilometers from the frontier with Hungary, a NATO and European Union member state.