All of Ukraine spent much of Thursday morning under air raid alerts after Russia launched its largest air barrage in nearly two weeks. Sirens rang out in cities near the Russian border to the country’s relatively peaceful west. The scale of the damage remained unclear, but Ukrainian air defenses repelled several drones and missiles throughout the attack.
Russian forces fired more than 120 missiles “to destroy critical infrastructure and commit civilian mass murder,” tweeted Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidential office.
Military administrators in at least six of Ukraine’s 25 regions confirmed blasts in their areas.
Several residential buildings in the capital Kyiv were destroyed, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the lead for disaster response in the Ukrainian presidential office.
An explosion near a playground rattled the windows of nearby homes. Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko urged residents to charge their electronic devices and fill water containers in case of shortages.
Klitschko said Ukrainian air defenses intercepted all 16 missiles fired at Kyiv, and that at least three areas of the city were damaged by debris. Three people were reported injured in Kyiv from falling debris after defensive missiles shot Russian-launched ones out of the sky.
Ukrainian air defense systems shot down 21 cruise missiles near Odesa, said Maksym Marchenko, the regional administrator for that region along the Black Sea. But successful missile strikes left the city without electricity or water.
Ninety percent of Lviv, a city near the Polish border, lost power, according to Mayor Andriy Sadovyi. The outage forced diesel generators to kick in to power emergency services. Public transportation there ground to a halt.
Strikes of the scale such as the one the one launched Thursday’s have become less frequent since they began Oct. 10. Earlier this week Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said that’s because Russia is running low on its stock of cruise missiles.
“They used to attack with such intensity once a week, then every 10 days, and then every two weeks,” he told Liga.net. “In theory they’ll run out.”
Russia has been reportedly relying on Iran to resupply on long-range weapons, especially unmanned attack drones that can swarm Ukrainian air defenses. The New York Times reported Wednesday that the Biden administration has launched a new effort to prevent Iran from obtaining the parts it needed to manufacture and sell weapons such as the ones appearing in Ukraine.
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