Russia bombarded Ukraine with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles in a large-scale overnight attack, which killed at least four people, officials said yesterday. For only the second time, Moscow used a new ballistic missile that it says flies at 10 times the speed of sound and is unstoppable.
The intense barrage and the launching of the nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile came days after Ukraine and its allies reported major progress toward agreeing how to defend the country from further Moscow aggression if a peace deal is struck to end Russia’s almost four-year-old invasion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he has made significant progress on the terms of a possible peace settlement in talks with Washington envoys, but Moscow has given no public signal it is willing to budge from its demands.
Photo: Reuters
The attack also coincides with a new chill in relations between Moscow and Washington after Russia condemned the US seizure of an oil tanker in the North Atlantic. It comes as US President Donald Trump has signaled he is on board with a hard-hitting sanctions package meant to economically cripple Moscow.
Ukrainian officials said four people were killed and at least 25 wounded in Kyiv during the overnight attack, as apartment buildings were struck.
Those killed included an emergency medical aid worker, Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said.
Four doctors and one police officer sustained injuries while responding to the ongoing attacks, authorities said.
About half of Kyiv’s apartment buildings — nearly 6,000 — were left without heating, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
The water supply was also disrupted.
Municipal services restored power and heating to public facilities, including hospitals and maternity wards, using mobile boiler units, he added.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said the attack was a retaliation to what Moscow said was a Ukrainian drone strike on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residence last month. Ukraine and US President Donald Trump have rejected the Russian claim of the attack on Putin’s residence.
Putin has previously said that the Oreshnik streaks to its target at Mach 10, “like a meteorite,” and has claimed it is immune to any missile defense system, adding that several of them used in a conventional strike could be as devastating as a nuclear attack.
Ukrainian intelligence said the missile has six warheads, each carrying six submunitions.
Moscow did not say where the Oreshnik hit, but Russian media and military bloggers said it targeted a huge underground natural gas storage facility in Ukraine’s western Lviv region.
Western military aid flows to Ukraine from a big supply hub in Poland just across the border from Lviv.
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