A fresh barrage of Russian missile strikes battered Ukraine on Thursday, wounding at least five people including a teenager and cutting electricity in the west. On Thursday morning, blasts were reported across the vast country including in the Ukrainian capital, the second city Kharkiv in the east and the western city of Lviv on the border with Poland.
Most of Lviv, where Russian strikes are still rare, was left without electricity, its mayor Andriy Sadoviy said. The missiles struck even the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk at the foothills of the picturesque Carpathian Mountains located nearly a thousand kilometres from Russia.
“The enemy keeps resorting to its missile terror against the peaceful citizens of Ukraine,” said Ukraine’s commander-in-chief General Valeriy Zaluzhny, adding that Russia had unleashed a wave of air and sea-based cruise missiles.
Zaluzhny said that Russia had launched 69 cruise missiles, 54 of which were shot down. Presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak said earlier that more than 120 missiles had been fired.
The attacks came 10 months into Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. In recent weeks Russian strikes have been battering the country’s energy grid, leaving millions in the cold and dark in the middle of winter.
The US embassy in Kyiv said on Twitter that Moscow was ramping up its campaign of attacks, “cruelly wielding cold and dark” against Ukraine. “Russia does not want peace with Ukraine. Russia wants the subjugation of Ukraine,” added British ambassador Melinda Simmons.
As Ukraine came under fresh attacks, Russian President Vladimir Putin took part by video link in a ceremony that saw a nuclear-powered submarine, the Emperor Alexander III, put to sea. Western intelligence have said that Russia is struggling to meet the ordnance needs for the invasion, but Moscow has refuted this.
“We will never run out of Kalibrs,” the Russian defence ministry said on messaging app Telegram, referring to the cruise missiles used to batter Ukraine.
Moscow has accused pro-Kyiv forces of targeting Russian military sites and civilian infrastructure, and on Thursday air defences was activated near Engels, a key air base hundreds of kilometres from Ukraine’s border, regional authorities said.
Engels, located in the central region of Saratov, is a base for Russia’s strategic aircraft that Kyiv says have been used to strike Ukraine. Governor Roman Busargin said that an “unidentified object” had been destroyed. This month the Engels base has already been targeted twice in deadly attacks that Moscow blames on Ukraine.
Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko said the situation was “tough” in the west of the country and the regions of Odessa and Kyiv and warned there would be emergency power shutdowns. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that at least three people were wounded in the strikes, including a 14-year-old girl.
Close to half of Kyiv’s population was left without power, he added. Two houses were hit by fragments of downed missiles in the east of the capital while an industrial enterprise and a playground were damaged in the city’s southwest, local officials said.
Air defences downed all 16 missiles that targeted Kyiv, according to local authorities. In the east, a “series of explosions” hit Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv, mayor Igor Terekhov said.
Governor Oleg Synegubov said “critical infrastructure” was targeted in the region of Kharkiv and its main city where four missiles hit eastern and southern neighbourhoods.
In the historic city of Lviv, mayor Sadoviy warned of potential water cuts. Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the president’s office, posted a picture of a Russian missile that hit a house in the region of Ivano-Frankivsk but did not explode.
“The cynicism of Russians has no bounds,” he wrote. In the south, Odessa governor Maksym Marchenko said air defence shot down 21 missiles over the region. He added that there was damage to energy infrastructure and emergency power cuts were enforced in the region.
In the southern city of Kherson the strikes damaged a medical facility and left two people injured, Tymoshenko said. Last month the Russian army was forced to retreat from the city during a Ukrainian counteroffensive but has kept targeting the regional capital ever since.
Moscow has said the strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure are a response to an explosion on the Kerch bridge connecting the Russian mainland to Crimea annexed by Moscow in 2014. The Kremlin has said it holds Kyiv ultimately responsible for the humanitarian impact of the strikes for refusing to capitulate to Russian terms.
On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he was convinced Moscow would achieve its goals in Ukraine sooner or later thanks to its “patience” and “perseverance”.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)
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