KYIV, (Reuters) – Ukrainian civilians raced for cover yesterday as Russia fired a barrage of missiles and drones across the country, killing at least 11 people, according to officials, a day after Kyiv won Western pledges of battlefield tanks to combat Moscow’s invasion.
The German and American announcements they would send dozens of tanks infuriated Russia, which in the past has responded to apparent Ukrainian successes with massed air strikes that left millions without light, heat or water.
The Kremlin said it saw the promised delivery of Western tanks as evidence of growing “direct involvement” of the United States and Europe in the 11-month-old war, something both deny.
Ukraine said it had shot down all 24 drones sent overnight by Russia, including 15 around the capital, and 47 of 55 Russian missiles – some fired from Tu-95 strategic bombers in the Russian Arctic.
“Another attempt by a terrorist country to intimidate us with a massive missile strike has recently suffered a defeat, just as the whole of Russia will soon be defeated,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a statement on Telegram.
Eleven people were killed and 11 wounded in the drone and missile strikes, which spanned 11 regions and also damaged 35 buildings, a State Emergency Service spokesperson said.
Air raid alarms had sounded across Ukraine as people headed to work. In the capital, crowds took cover for a time in underground metro stations.
“I’m left without anything … Not a single room is left intact, everything got hit,” said Halyna Panosyan, 67, surveying twisted sheets of corrugated metal, crumpled masonry and a large missile crater outside her ruined house in Hlevakha near Kyiv.
“At first, I heard a roar. And then there was an extremely loud strike that made me jump up. I was in the bedroom … I was saved by the fact that the bedroom is to the other side of the house.”
A 70-year-old woman who gave her name only as Valentyna said she managed to survive by scrambling out of her damaged house over glass splinters. “Everything was in rubble,” she said.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said electricity substations had been hit as Russia continued to target energy facilities.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy producer, said it was conducting pre-emptive emergency shutdowns in Kyiv, the surrounding region and the regions of Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk.
In Odesa, the Black Sea port designated a “World Heritage in Danger” site on Wednesday by the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO, Russian missiles damaged energy facilities, authorities said, just as French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna was arriving.
“What we saw today, new strikes on civilian Ukrainian infrastructure is not waging war, it’s waging war crimes,” she said.
Colonna was due to meet her Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, to discuss humanitarian and military aid and potentially whether France might join its NATO allies in supplying Ukraine with battle tanks, in this case its own Leclerc model.
Both Moscow and Kyiv, which have so far relied on Soviet-era T-72 tanks, are expected to mount new ground offensives in spring.
