Russia launches large-scale missile attack, Ukraine says
Russia attacked Ukraine with several waves of rockets on Saturday morning, the Ukrainian military said, putting the entire country under air raid alert and sending people to shelter as booms were heard in several cities.
The attack, which started around 5 a.m. local time and lasted about three hours, involved cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles that targeted cities including Kiev, the capital, and Lviv, near the border with Poland. It appeared to follow Russia's recent strategy for large-scale air strikes: waves of different types of air weapons were launched almost simultaneously from multiple locations and aimed at different targets.
Ukraine's air force said Russian fighter jets had launched cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea, southeast of Ukraine, and hypersonic missiles from a region near Moscow, north of Ukraine. Local Ukrainian media reported explosions – which could have been caused by Ukrainian air defenses – in cities such as Dnipro in the southeast and Kropyvnytskyi in the center.
The scale of the attack and the level of destruction remained unclear at 10:00 am. It appeared to be part of an air campaign that Russia began in late December, attacking industrial and military infrastructure and repeatedly hitting civilian areas.
Saturday's attack was the fourth large-scale nationwide attack on Ukraine in about two weeks. In the previous attack, on Monday, Ukraine managed to intercept only about a third of the missiles launched against its territory. Military analysts say this is a sign that Kiev is short of the surface-to-air missiles needed to shoot down incoming Russian missiles.
“We seriously lack modern air defense systems,” Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged on Wednesday during a visit to Lithuania.
Ukrainian officials said in the fall that Russia had stockpiled more than 800 high-precision missiles in preparation for major attacks aimed at weakening Ukraine's defenses.
In the three previous major air strikes on Ukraine, Russia has fired a total of more than 270 missiles, including several of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, one of the most advanced weapons in the Russian arsenal. The volume consumed Ukraine's air defenses, making it more vulnerable to future attacks.
“Ukraine has deployed a significant stockpile of missiles for these three attacks,” said Yurii Ihnat, spokesman for the Ukrainian air force. He said this on national television on Tuesday. “That is why there is a shortage of anti-aircraft guided missiles, and no one is hiding it.”
The lack of air defense means Ukraine must divide resources between the front line and cities far from the fighting, leaving some places less well defended than others.
Ukraine, which does not have the capacity to produce air defense systems domestically, depends on its Western allies for supplies to protect its airspace. During a visit to the Baltic states on Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Zelensky called on the United States and the European Union to release long-awaited aid packages that have been blocked by political infighting.
Air defense systems, he said, are “what we need most.”