On Wednesday, Russia unveiled a wave of missiles and drones on Ukraine’s power facilities, intensifying a months-long bombing crusade at a precarious time in the war for Ukraine.
The barrage came a day after Kyiv said it had carried out its largest aerial attack of the war on Russian army factories and energy hubs hundreds of kilometers from 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 old woman resident in the town of Sknyliv, in western Ukraine, in the house at the time of 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 hastened to condemn the measures and requested more powerful security assistance from foreign allies.
“Another Russian attack. We are in the middle of winter and the goal of the Russians remains the same: our energy sector,” he wrote on social media.
The Russian Defense Ministry indicated in an informative session that their forces had made “high precision” movements in the electrical facilities that “support the Ukrainian commercial military complex. “
He reaffirmed that all designated objectives had been achieved.
However, the Ukraine Air Force said it had demolished 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.
Last week, the EU paid kyiv the first 3 billion euros ($3. 1 billion) of a loan subsidized through interest earned on frozen Russian assets.
The United States Department of State announced on Wednesday new sanctions against “more than 150 people and entities involved in the Russian defense industry and support their military-industrial base. “
Meanwhile, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s president-elect, said that the new administration will 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 continued a crusade of several months bombing opposed to the Ukrainian energy infrastructure, saying that the attacks pointed to services to kyiv’s soldiers.
The Russian military had accused kyiv of having used missiles provided through the United States and the United Kingdom by one of the movements in the previous day and had promised that it would “remain unanswered. “
On Wednesday night, in Russia’s Voronezh oblast, which borders Ukraine, several drones “caused a chimney in an oil depot,” Voronezh Gov. Alexander Gusev said on Telegram, because videos through witnesses showed a really extensive chimney.
The growing attacks with drones and missiles from kyiv and Moscow arrive at a complicated moment for Ukraine, on the other side of the extensive front line.
At several key moments in the northern Kharkiv and eastern Donetsk regions, Russian forces were able to make progress through the operation of their labor force and resource gains.
Based on these achievements, the Russian Ministry of Defense said Wednesday that its forces had captured the Ukrainka village, in the Donetsk commercial region, that Kremlin claims to be from Russia.
Even if the war has lasted almost 3 years, there are still safe spaces for cooperation between Moscow and kyiv, which announced on Wednesday that has exchanged 25 prisoners of war each.