Russian air attacks on a few major Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, Dnipro, and Kharkiv, left at least 18 people dead and more than 100 wounded early Tuesday. Those harsh strikes came right after days of louder warnings that Moscow was planning some massive and coordinated offensive.
As the conflict has been dragging on for over four years now, Russia is still aiming at Ukraine’s electricity grid and other civilian facilities, while Kyiv has been stepping up counterattacks on Russian oil sites. Even so, both sides insist that civilians are not being targeted on purpose, the civilian death count keeps rising and rising.
Massive Coordinated Strikes Target Major Cities
In the southeastern city of Dnipro, a rough missile and drone attack killed 12 people and left 36 wounded. The State Emergency Service of Ukraine said the victims included a rescue worker who was hit in a “double-tap” strike, meaning it was apparently planned in a deliberate way to nail the first responders who go to the scene. Local officials added that everyone who survived was taken to hospitals. They also shared images, of course of totally devastated apartment blocks and a destroyed children’s playground.
Not long after, the capital saw a similarly nasty bombardment. There were at least six deaths and 66 injuries, with several children among them. Officials from the Kyiv City State Administration said a suspected missile strike caused a 24-story residential building to collapse, trapping people under the rubble. Bits of falling debris also started fires in multiple places, including a nine-story apartment complex and a kindergarten, in the Obolon district.
During the night, the shelling cut electricity for about 140,000 residents. Still, DTEK, the national power company, reported that crews restored power to around 110,000 people pretty quickly, but two of their engineers were injured while doing the emergency repairs.
Overwhelming Aerial Assault and Retaliation
Ukrainian military officials say Russia rolled out a staggering 656 drones and 73 missiles during the night. Air defenders reportedly intercepted 40 missiles and 602 drones. The whole attack reportedly also featured eight Zircon hypersonic missiles, and that seems to be the biggest pile of these extremely fast, long-range weapons ever used in one single assault so far.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation described it a bit differently, calling it a “massive strike” conducted with high precision long-range arms, aimed only at Ukraine’s defense industry facilities. Moscow also stated that the operation was a direct reply to a recent Ukrainian drone strike on a student dormitory in Russian-held Luhansk, killing 21 people.
The sheer size of the Russian attack seemed to match what intelligence had already pointed to. Like, just a day before it started, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, said to people that something was coming; he even told citizens that an imminent Russian strike was near, so everyone should follow every air raid alert and get under shelter right away.
At the same time, violence kept pushing out across other fronts too. In the northeastern Kharkiv region, drone and missile attacks hurt 10 people, including a child. Over on Russian territory, officials said the Ilsky oil refinery in the southern Krasnodar region caught fire after a Ukrainian drone strike, and at the same time, Russian air defenses were busy fending off drone attacks above the naval base in Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea.
And even though the war has been dragging on for more than four years since the February 2022 full-scale invasion, attempts to stop the fighting have barely moved forward. Diplomatic momentum is still pretty much frozen, especially since the administration of US President Donald Trump is putting most of its foreign policy focus on trouble spots in the Middle East.
