Dozens of Russian missiles have been fired at Kyiv and different Ukrainian cities on Thursday in what officers described as one of many largest each day barrages in a month-long marketing campaign focusing on the nation’s power infrastructure.
“Greater than 120 missiles over Ukraine [were] launched by [Russia] to destroy essential infrastructure and kill civilians en masse,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, stated in a publish on Twitter.
The variety of victims and the extent of the harm nationwide, virtually a 12 months after the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s large-scale intervention invasion of ukraineweren’t instantly clear.
The Ukrainian Air Power Command stated in a press release that “after the night time assault by suicide drones, the enemy is attacking Ukraine from varied instructions with air and sea cruise missiles from plane and strategic ships”.
Native officers in two Russian border areas stated anti-aircraft defenses shot down Ukrainian targets, together with drones. The obvious assaults recommended Ukraine was persevering with to assault Russian territory after a sequence of latest strikes on airbases deep behind enemy traces, together with two hits on Engels airbase.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Zelenskyy’s administration, in a Telegram channel Publish which included images of destruction, stated three individuals have been injured, together with a 14-year-old woman, after a missile landed in a residential space in Kyiv’s jap Darnytsky district.
Tymoshenko too publish {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, the mayor of Kyiv, stated there had been “a number of explosions within the capital”. He urged residents to cost their telephones and fill up on water as “there could also be energy cuts”.
Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, the most important provincial capital in western Ukraine the place explosions have been additionally heard, stated “90% of town is with out electrical energy”, including that the water provide may very well be disturbed.
Explosions have been reported in lots of Ukrainian cities, some near the entrance line, together with Odessa on the Black Sea and Kharkiv, the most important metropolis in jap Ukraine.
Russian missile and kamikaze drone strikes on Ukraine’s electrical energy grid and heating infrastructure have triggered energy and heating outages lasting hours and days in latest months. Moscow launched the marketing campaign this fall after counteroffensives pushed Russian forces again from giant swathes of territory in jap and southern Ukraine, the place Moscow nonetheless holds practically 20 p.c of Ukrainian territory.
Klitschko stated the Air Power shot down 16 missiles over the capital.
Thursday’s assault comes days after US President Joe Biden stated he had authorised the provision of a battery of Patriot missiles for Kyiv to be delivered within the coming months. Zelenskyy has advocated for months for america and European nations to bolster Ukraine’s air defenses, which rely totally on depleting Soviet-era methods, together with the S300 and Buk missiles, with methods extra subtle air defenses.
Kyiv obtained a handful of medium-range methods, together with an Iris-T from Germany, Nasams from america and Norway, and Hawks from Spain.
After Thursday’s assaults, Podolyak criticized Western leaders who had urged Kyiv to have interaction in peace talks, including that the strikes confirmed that Russia was not, regardless of Putin’s latest public requires negotiations, inquisitive about peace greater than 10 months after launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“We anticipate additional proposals from the ‘peacekeepers’ on ‘peaceable settlement’, ‘safety ensures for the Russian Federation and the undesirability of provocations’,” Podolyak added.
Further reporting by Max Seddon in Riga