At least 20 people have been killed in a night of unusually intense Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, which Moscow claimed were retaliation against what it describes as Ukrainian “terrorist” attacks against its oil infrastructure.
Waves of weapons that amounted to “more than 70 missiles and nearly 500 drones” saturated Ukrainian capital Kyiv overnight and into Thursday morning in an 11 hour-long attack that has now been confirmed to have killed 20. Rescue efforts continue and the death toll may yet rise still further, it was stated.
Over 20 residential buildings were hit by the air raids, which in addition to the 20 dead also saw over 90 injured, over a dozen buildings destroyed, and even tortoises and crocodiles injured at the city zoo, state media said. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the air strikes a “night of horror”.
The frequency of air raids against Kyiv — and most are much smaller than last night’s attack — have seen many in the city become less fastidious about going to air raid shelters when the sirens sound, Le Figaro noted in its report. In an attempt to overcome this air raid fatigue and acting on apparent intelligence giving the government advance warning of last night’s strikes, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the country on Wednesday that a worse than usual night loomed.
He said while on a visit to Ireland: “I am asking all our people to be extra careful, take care of yourselves and your children, and use shelters, this is very important”.
Russia called the attack a “massive retaliatory strike on Ukraine” and claimed it had targeted “solely military or military-related facilities”, mostly drone factories. Such claims are typical to the conflict, where both sides insist they only strike military targets and never civilians, although by accident or design civilians and civil infrastructure on both sides have become victims of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Russia claimed the attacks were in retaliation against what it called “the Kiev regime’s terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure on Russian territory”, namely its highly successful weeks-long campaign of using long-distance drones to hit Russian oil refineries. As previously stated, the strikes have been impactful enough to trigger fuel shortages at the pump in some Russian regions.
The Russian strikes of Wednesday night were of sufficient magnitude that NATO air defence systems were activated to ‘catch’ any over-shooting missiles or weapons that might over-penetrate the warzone, as has now happened several times before. Poland scrambled fighter jets and activated its air-defence systems overnight, its military said, while Finland to the north temporarily restricted its airspace.