Scores of Russian missiles have been fired at Kyiv and different Ukrainian cities on Thursday in what officers described as one of many largest day by day barrages of a months-long marketing campaign concentrating on the nation’s power infrastructure.
“Russia retains resorting to its missile terror in opposition to peaceable residents of Ukraine,” Normal Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, mentioned in a Twitter submit. “This morning . . . 69 missiles have been launched in complete. 54 cruise missiles have been shot down by the belongings of Ukraine’s armed forces,” he added.
Colonel Yuriy Ignat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s air drive, advised the Monetary Instances that along with the missiles, Russia had fired no less than 11 kamikaze drones at Ukraine early on Thursday.
The variety of casualties and the extent of the injury nationwide, nearly a yr into Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, weren’t instantly clear.
Ukraine’s air drive command mentioned in a press release that “after the evening assault of kamikaze drones, the enemy assaults Ukraine from numerous instructions with air and sea-based cruise missiles from strategic plane and ships”.
Native officers in two Russian areas on the border mentioned anti-air defences had shot down Ukrainian targets, together with drones. The obvious assaults advised Ukraine was persevering with to assault Russian territory after a sequence of current strikes on air bases deep behind enemy traces, together with two hits on the Engels air base.
In neighbouring Belarus, which has allowed its ally Russia to make use of the nation as a launch pad for assaults with out becoming a member of the struggle itself, officers claimed to have shot down a stray Ukrainian air defence missile. Belarus’s international ministry mentioned it summoned the Ukrainian ambassador and warned him of “disastrous penalties for all” if any additional missiles landed within the nation.
In a video posted by state information company Belta, Anatoly Konovalov, navy commander of the western Brest area the place the Soviet-era S300 missile reportedly fell, mentioned “residents don’t have anything to fret about”. He likened the incident to an identical incident final month when a stray Ukrainian anti-aircraft strike landed in Poland, killing two, as Kyiv tried to repel a Russian barrage of comparable depth to Thursday’s strikes.
Ukraine’s defence ministry mentioned it was prepared for an “goal investigation” of the incident.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration, in a Telegram channel post that included images of destruction, mentioned three folks have been injured, amongst them a 14-year-old lady, after a missile landed in a residential neighbourhood within the japanese Darnytsky district of Kyiv. Tymoshenko additionally posted {a photograph} of a Russian missile that landed in a home in Ivano-Frankivsk, a provincial capital in western Ukraine, however didn’t explode.
Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv’s mayor, mentioned there have been “a number of explosions within the capital”. He urged residents to cost their telephones and top off on water as “there could also be energy outages”.
Andriy Sadovyi, mayor of Lviv, the biggest provincial capital in western Ukraine the place explosions have been additionally heard, mentioned “90 per cent of town is with out electrical energy”, including that water provides may very well be disrupted.
Explosions have been reported in lots of Ukrainian cities and cities, some near the frontline, together with Odesa on the Black Sea and Kharkiv, the biggest metropolis in japanese Ukraine.
Russian missile and kamikaze drone strikes on the Ukrainian electrical energy grid and heating infrastructure have triggered rolling, hours- and days-long energy and heating blackouts in current months. Moscow launched the marketing campaign this autumn after counteroffensives pushed again Russian forces from swaths of territory in japanese and southern Ukraine, the place Moscow nonetheless holds shut to twenty per cent of Ukrainian territory.
Klitschko mentioned the air drive had downed 16 missiles over the capital.
Thursday’s assault comes days after US president Joe Biden mentioned he had accredited provision of 1 Patriot missile battery for Kyiv to be delivered within the coming months. Zelenskyy has for months pleaded for the US and European nations to bolster Ukraine’s air defences, which rely totally on depleting Soviet-era gear, with extra refined air defence programs.
In a press release on Thursday, Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the US Nationwide Safety Council, mentioned: “That is one other instance of Putin’s brutality, attacking Ukraine’s important infrastructure . . . as a part of the barbaric struggle that Russia is waging. The US will proceed to offer Ukraine with what it must defend itself.”
Kyiv has acquired a handful of medium-range programs together with one Iris-T from Germany, Nasams from the US and Norway, in addition to Hawks from Spain.
After Thursday’s assaults, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser in Zelenskyy’s administration, criticised western leaders who had urged Kyiv to have interaction in peace talks, including that the strikes confirmed Russia was not, regardless of current public calls by Putin for negotiations, concerned about peace greater than 10 months after he launched his full-scale invasion.
“We’re ready for additional proposals from ‘peacekeepers’ about ‘peaceable settlement,’ ‘safety ensures for the Russian Federation and undesirability of provocations’,” Podolyak added.
Further reporting by Max Seddon in Riga
