Russia launched several waves of missile and drone attacks targeting multiple regions of Ukraine regions and killing at least four people in the process, the country’s military said early on Tuesday, just a day after Moscow’s biggest air attack of the war on its neighbour. Two people were killed when a hotel was “wiped out” in the central Ukraine city of Kryvyi Rih, regional officials said. Two died in drone attacks on the city of Zaporizhzhia, east of Kryvyi Rih.
Kyiv region’s air defence systems were deployed several times overnight to repel missiles and drones targeting the Ukrainian capital, the region’s military administration stated. On Monday, Russia launched more than 200 missiles and drones, killing at least seven and damaging energy infrastructure in an attack condemned by U.S. President Joe Biden as “outrageous”.
Analysts at the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War, said in their note late on Monday that Moscow “likely lacks the defense-industrial capacity to sustain such massive strikes at a similar scale with regularity.”
Several Russian military bloggers, such as the pro-war collective under the name of Rybar, called the Moscow attacks an “act of retaliation” for Ukraine’s surprising incursion into Russia’s territory – the first such action since World War Two.
The Kremlin said on Monday there will be a response to Ukraine’s action in Kursk, but three weeks into the incursion, Kyiv claims further advances. Moscow says it keeps pummeling Ukrainian troops there – but is still unable to push them out.
The scale of Tuesday’s attacks and their full impact was not immediately known, but Ukraine’s air force said it recorded the launch of several groups of drones and the take-off from Russian airfields of Tu-95 strategic bombers and MiG-31 fighter aircraft.
The Kremlin has denied targeting civilians in the conflict that Russia launched against it’s smaller neighbour with a full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Russian Defence Ministry stated that its strikes on Monday hit critical elements of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Team Bharatshakti
(With inputs from Reuters)
