Missiles force families to flee underground

At least four killed as Putin marks his enemy’s Independence Day weekend with hundreds of missiles and drones.

Ukrainian firefighters extinguish a fire on a site following an air attack, in the Odesa region, on Monday. Picture: AFP

At least four people died after Russia launched one of its largest aerial attacks on Ukraine since the 2022 invasion, sending more than 100 missiles and a hundred kamikaze drones to targets across the country, cutting off power and water in towns and cities.

The strikes on Monday came as Russian forces stepped up their assault of the town of Pokrovsk in the east and Ukrainian troops began meeting stiffer resistance inside the pocket of Russian territory in Kursk under their control.

“It was one of the biggest combined strikes,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram, two days after Ukraine celebrated Independence Day with morale boosted nationwide by the surprise seizure of Russian territory along the border.

Ukrainians had been expecting a major Russian missile attack to coincide with Independence Day, which Ukraine marked on Saturday.

At least four people were killed and dozens wounded in the attacks, with power and water infrastructure targeted across 15 regions of Ukraine, including Rivne and Volyn in the northwest, Khmelnytskyi in the southwest, Zhytomyr in the north, Lviv in the west, Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad and Vinnytsia in central Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia in the southeast and Odesa in the south.

Approximately 15 missiles and 15 drones targeting Kyiv were shot down, military administration head Serhiy Popko wrote on Telegram.

“The energy infrastructure has once again become the target of Russian terrorists,” Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said, explaining that state-owned power grid operator Ukrenergo had been forced to implement emergency power cuts to stabilise the system.

“In order to stop the barbaric shelling of Ukrainian cities, it is necessary to destroy the place from which the Russian missiles are launched,” Mr Shmyhal said. “We count on the support of our allies and will definitely make Russia pay.”

Residents in Kyiv took shelter in Metro stations in the early morning. “We are always worried. We have been under stress for almost three years now,” 34-year-old lawyer Yulia Voloshyna told AFP.

The Russian Defence Ministry said the attacks used “long-range precision air and sea-based weapons and strike drones against critical energy infrastructure facilities that support Ukraine’s military-industrial complex”.

The strikes came after Ryan Evans, a British citizen and safety adviser working for the Reuters news agency, was killed in a missile strike on a hotel in eastern Ukraine on Saturday. When asked by AFP to comment on an assertion by Mr Zelensky that the attack was carried out deliberately, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “I will say it again. The strikes are against military infrastructure targets or targets related to military infrastructure.”

Mr Zelensky separately announced on Sunday that his forces were advancing in the Russian region of Kursk, more than two weeks after Kyiv launched its surprise incursion across the border.

Poland said the attacks on western Ukraine were of such a scale that its warplanes and those of its NATO allies had been put on alert. Much of the Western weaponry given to Ukraine goes via Rzeszow air base in eastern Poland.

Russian and Ukrainian negotiators had been due to begin indirect talks mediated by Qatar over ceasing fire on each other’s infrastructure. Moscow, however, cancelled the talks following the Kursk operation while denying they were ever scheduled, adding that no negotiations could take place with Ukrainian troops inside its territory.

Last week Ukraine launched its largest-ever drone attack on the Moscow region, warning more would follow, although all were shot down by Russian air defences.

On Saturday, Mr Zelensky announced that Ukraine had developed a new “drone missile” called Palanitsya, which had already been used and was more powerful and faster than other hardware in the nation’s arsenal.

Palanitsya is a Ukrainian pastry whose name is so hard for Russian speakers to pronounce that it is used as a test to detect saboteurs.

THE TIMES