Russia unleashed a wave of missiles and drones on Ukrainian power comforts on Wednesday, intensifying a months-long bombing crusade at a precarious time in Ukraine’s war.
The flood arrived here a day after kyiv announced that he had carried out his greatest air attack of the war against the Russian army factories and the power centers of the front line.
The Ukrainian air force said Russia launched 43 cruise and ballistic missiles as well as 74 attack drones in the barrage, which targeted sites mainly in western Ukraine.
Photo: AFP
Oleksandra Komuna, an elderly resident of the village of Sknyliv in western Ukraine, was in the house in the attack when lamps and plaster began to fall.
“All the doors and windows were blown out, everything exploded. The car was broken and the roof was broken. There were cracks everywhere,” he said. It’s a disaster. “
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was quick to condemn the moves and called for more potent security assistance from foreign allies.
“Another Russian attack. We are in the middle of winter and the objective of the Russians remains the same: our energy sector, ”he wrote on social networks.
Russia’s Defense Ministry showed in a briefing that its forces had carried out “high-precision” movements in power services that “support the Ukrainian military’s business complex. “
He reiterated the statement that all the designated objectives had been met.
However, the Ukrainian air force said that it had shot down 30 of the missiles and 47 drones, while Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said the Russian attack had “failed”.
A few hours after the dam, Zelenskiy called on the West to use about $250 billion of unloved frozen assets to buy weapons from Kyiv. He spoke at a press convention in Warsaw with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
“Ukraine will take this money, allocate a large amount for domestic production and for the import of exactly those types of weapons that Ukraine does not have,” he said.
The EU last week paid out to Kyiv the first 3 billion euros (US$3.1 billion) of a loan backed by the interest earned on frozen Russian assets.
The US Department of State on Wednesday announced new sanctions on “more than 150 individuals and entities involved in Russia’s defense industry and supporting its military-industrial base.”
Meanwhile, US president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said that the new administration would seek “bold diplomacy” to end the war.
“The concessions will have to be done through the Russian Federation, also through the Ukrainians,” he said.
Moscow has been carrying out a bombing campaign against the Ukrainian electrical infrastructure for several months, claiming that the attacks aimed at facilities of the kyiv army.
The Russian military had accused kyiv of missiles supplied through the United States and the United Kingdom for one of the previous day’s moves and promised that this “will not go unanswered. “
On Wednesday evening in Russia’s Voronezh Oblast bordering Ukraine several drones “sparked a fire at an oil depot,” Voronezh Governor Alexander Gusev said on Telegram, as videos posted by witnesses showed a substantial blaze.
The increasing attacks by kyiv and Moscow with drones and missiles come at a difficult time for Ukraine, on the other side of the long front line.
At several key moments in the northern Kharkiv and eastern Donetsk regions, Russian forces have made steady gains by exploiting their benefits in terms of manpower and resources.
Building on those developments, the Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday that its forces had captured the village of Ukrainka in the Donetsk trading region that the Kremlin said was part of Russia.
Although the war has been for almost three years, there are still cooperation spaces between Moscow and kyiv, which announced on Wednesday that they had exchanged 25 prisoners of war each.