“Kyiv was the main target,” the Ukrainian air force commander Mykola Oleshchuk wrote on his Telegram channel. The capital was attacked in the early hours of Saturday with around 75 Iranian-made Shahed drones, Ukrainian officials claimed, adding that 71 had been shot down.
Five people were wounded by falling debris, including an 11-year-old child, the mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko, said. Several buildings, including a kindergarten, were damaged and around 17,000 people in the Kyiv region were left without electricity as a result of the strikes. Power was restored later in the day.
Ukrainian officials said the drones came in from two different directions with the aim of trying to overwhelm the capital’s air defences.
Residents of Kyiv were woken by an air raid siren at about 2.30am, and several waves of attack followed, with loud booms beginning at around 4am and audible again in the city centre close to 6am.
“Our soldiers shot down most of the drones. Unfortunately, not all,” the Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, wrote on Telegram.
In the past few days, the first major snow of the winter has fallen in Kyiv. Although temperatures rose above zero again at the weekend, colder weather is forecast in the coming days and weeks.
Bridget Brink, the US ambassador to Ukraine, wrote on X: “As temperatures drop below zero in Ukraine, Russia cynically sends waves of Iranian drones to attack the capital and the country.”
Previously, Ukrainian officials had speculated that Russia was waiting for a cold spell before launching its winter attacks on infrastructure.
“It has been a warm autumn and Russia postponed these attacks, but they will come for sure. We are preparing,” Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, told the Guardian on Monday.
Danilov said he had recently been on an unannounced visit to London where he met top security officials and military figures and discussed how to protect Ukrainian infrastructure against Russian strikes this winter.
On Tuesday, British defence intelligence speculated that Moscow had been stockpiling missiles in preparation for a major attack.
The intelligence report said: “Russia has now refrained from launching its premier air-launched cruise missiles from its heavy bomber fleet for nearly two months, likely allowing it to build up a substantial stock of these weapons. Russia is highly likely to use these missiles if it repeats last year’s attempts to destroy Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure.”
Waves of strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure began last October, lasting several months and destroying an estimated 40% of the country’s capacity. Millions of Ukrainian households were left without power for weeks in the coldest winter periods, and the whole country was told to try to conserve electricity.
Ukrainian officials say they are better prepared for the anticipated Russian attack this year, with air defence systems provided by western partners protecting Kyiv and other key sites, though still unable to protect the whole country.
Ukraine has demonstrated a capacity to hit with its own drone strikes inside Russia over recent months, and in October, Zelenskiy warned that if Moscow attacked in the same way this year, there would be retaliatory actions. “We are preparing for terrorist attacks on our energy infrastructure … This year we will not only defend ourselves, but also respond,” he said.
Source: theguardian.com
Author: Shaun Walker in Kyiv
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