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Russian forces have pounded Ukraine with nearly 60 missiles and attack drones, the largest nationwide air strikes since a massive barrage over the new year period.
As Moscow intensifies its campaign of hitting energy infrastructure and other targets for the second successive winter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged western allies to approve military aid packages to boost Kyiv’s depleted air defence capabilities.
“There is a lack of air defence both on the battlefield and for the defence of Ukrainian cities across the country,” Zelenskyy said in an online video address on Sunday to a Swedish defence conference, pointing to 500 strikes within a few days even before Monday’s barrage.
General Valeriy Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, said air defences intercepted 18 of 51 missiles fired overnight into Monday morning, as well as eight attack drones, adding that “critical, civil infrastructure, industrial and military facilities were attacked”.
Ukraine’s air force urged citizens to rush to bomb shelters at about 6am, as it reported that 11 Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers were in the air and that ballistic and cruise missiles had been fired.
A shopping mall was largely destroyed in Kryviy Rih, Zelenskyy’s home town, after at least nine missile strikes hit the steel and ore mining city in central Ukraine. “The enraged enemy again struck at civilians,” the region’s governor Serhiy Lysak said in a statement, adding that two dozen private houses were also damaged.
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Lysak and other regional officials reported at least four deaths from the strikes. Ten people, including five children, were killed on Saturday after a Russian missile struck residential buildings in the eastern town of Pokrovsk.
Four missiles struck Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, officials said. “The morning begins with an explosion in the city,” Ihor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv, wrote in a post on social media. The north-eastern city has been regularly targeted since Russia failed to capture it in the first weeks after President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Explosions were also reported by officials in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia and Khmelnytsky region of western Ukraine, where Russia has routinely targeted an air base.
Russia has ramped up attacks on air bases in an effort to counter Ukrainian fighter jets and bombers that have conducted long-range strikes using British Storm Shadow and French Scalp cruise missiles.
Those strikes have put pressure on Russian operations in Crimea, the peninsula it occupied in 2014, which has become a staging area for the invasion and blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports. Kyiv has in recent months unilaterally broken the blockade with shipments of grain, steel and other products.
The attacks on Ukrainian air bases are also seen as a pre-emptive attempt to destroy runways and aviation infrastructure before Kyiv receives its first batch of F-16 fighter jets from western allies. Ukrainian pilots are currently training on F-16s at Nato nation bases, including in nearby Romania.
With the US and EU countries struggling to approve military and financial assistance, officials in Kyiv are increasingly concerned that the country’s military and civilian population could find themselves unprotected if continued Russian missile and drone strikes deplete air defences.
But the country’s army hopes the F-16s’ arrival will end the dominance of Russia’s air force and, in turn, help reboot a struggling counteroffensive that failed to liberate southern and eastern regions of Ukraine. Russia currently occupies 18 per cent of state territory.
“If Russia loses control of the sky, it will lose all its power on the battlefield,” Zelenskyy added.
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