Russia pounds Ukraine with ‘one of the largest strikes’ of the war

KYIV, Ukraine — Moscow launched more than 200 missiles and drones across a wide swath of Ukraine on Monday, damaging energy facilities and sending residents of Kyiv into basements and subways to seek shelter. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the assault as “one of the largest strikes” of the 30-month-old war.

The strikes occurred at a volatile time in the conflict, coming against the backdrop of Ukraine’s cross-border incursion into southern Russia — the first invasion on Russian soil since World War II. On Monday, Ukraine’s forces continued to try to advance in the region.

The offensive into the Kursk region has shifted the dynamics of the war after months in which Ukraine’s forces were on the defensive in Ukraine’s east. The push has slowed in recent days, but Zelenskyy said Sunday that Ukrainian forces had advanced by 1 to 3 kilometers and taken control of two more settlements. It was not possible to verify the claim independently.

At the same time, Russian troops have been attacking relentlessly along the front line inside Ukraine, closing in on the key city of Pokrovsk and razing towns and villages with artillery barrages and glide bombs.

The drone and missile attacks Monday, which began around dawn, targeted energy infrastructure in the capital, Kyiv, and in the regions of Lviv and Rivne in the west and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast, authorities said.

The strikes appeared to be an escalation of a Russian campaign against Ukraine’s power grid and inflicted damage significant enough to cause blackouts in Kyiv and other cities.

“Like most previous Russian strikes, this one is just as vile, targeting critical civilian infrastructure,” Zelenskyy said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. “There is a lot of damage in the energy sector,” he said, adding that crews were repairing the damage.

Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure in attempts to damage the economy and compound civilian misery caused by the war.

Officials said at least four people had been killed and more than 30 others injured Monday. An earlier estimate said eight people had died.

Air-raid sirens have become a grim routine for many in Ukraine, and on Monday people in Kyiv sought shelter in basements and in the city’s subway system, whose stations are deep underground.

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, reported power and water outages in some parts of the city, and the head of the regional administration in Lviv, Maksym Kozytskyi, also reported power failures.

The rate at which the Ukrainian air force said it was intercepting drones and missiles dipped earlier this year as its stockpiles dwindled and the U.S. Congress debated whether to keep sending American-made interceptor missiles. Supplies resumed in the spring after the United States passed a $61 billion aid bill, and this summer Western air defense systems have rushed into Ukraine.

Ukraine’s air force claimed it shot down or electronically disabled 201 of the 236 missiles and exploding drones Russia fired Monday, a figure that could not be independently verified. The statement did not elaborate on how Ukraine had achieved the 85% success rate, but it was one of the highest of the war.

Ukraine said “all available weapons and equipment were used,” including fighter jets, ground-launched interceptor missiles and teams of soldiers with machine guns.

Ukraine has also increased its own attacks on military and infrastructure targets within Russia, hoping to slow its war effort, damage its economy and potentially sap civilian morale. Last week, it struck an oil and aviation fuel tank farm in Russia’s Rostov region, setting it ablaze.

On Monday, a fire broke out at the Omsk oil refinery, one of the largest oil refineries in Russia, according to the Omsk regional governor, Vitaly Khotsenko, who said in a post on Telegram that one person had died and six others were injured. The governor did not say what caused the fire at the refinery, which is around 1,500 miles from the Ukrainian border.

The Russian strikes in Ukraine on Monday came a day after a missile strike on a hotel in the eastern city of Kramatorsk killed a British safety adviser working with a team of journalists from the Reuters news agency and wounded two of Reuters’ reporters. One of the journalists, a 40-year-old Ukrainian, remained in critical condition, while the other had been discharged from hospital, Reuters said in a statement Monday.

Ukraine’s state prosecutor said on social media said it had opened an investigation into possible war crimes and that the residential neighborhood in Kramatorsk where the hotel was located had been deliberately targeted by Russian forces — though it is not known whether the hotel itself was a target.

Kramatorsk is around 16 miles west of the front line in Donetsk province, which has experienced the heaviest fighting this year with Ukraine on the defensive. Zelenskyy said Monday that Ukraine had decided to further strengthen its defense of Pokrovsk, an important road and rail hub.

More than 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to United Nations data.

Ukrainian leaders used Monday’s attack to renew their call for permission to use weapons systems provided by the country’s allies in NATO, including the United States, to strike military targets in Russia. Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister, also called on Ukraine’s western neighbors to shoot down Russian missiles flying inside Ukraine near their borders, to ease the burden on Ukraine’s air defense forces.

“None of these decisions are escalatory,” Kuleba said on social media. “To the contrary, they will deter Russia.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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