Russia launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Ukraine on Monday, killing at least three people, the Ukrainian authorities said, with explosions rocking major cities, including the capital, Kyiv. Energy infrastructure was also targeted in the attacks, officials said.
“The attack of the enemy strike drones continues. Stay in shelters,” the Ukrainian Air Force said in one of a series of Telegram posts issued as different cities were hit.
In addition to Kyiv, the country’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv, and the western city of Lviv were also hit. Air raid alerts sounded in many places. “There are six Tu-22M3 aircraft in the air,” another air force message on social media said, referring to Russian bombers that can launch missiles.
The strikes came a day after a barrage of attacks on the eastern city of Kramatorsk. A member of a Reuters news agency team, a British safety adviser, was killed in the city when a missile struck the hotel where he was staying, Reuters said. Two Reuters journalists were also wounded in the strike.
Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Kursk region of Russia on Aug. 6, seeking to shift the dynamics of the war, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had pledged a decisive response. It was not clear whether the attacks on Monday signaled part of that retaliation or whether Moscow was seeking to increase the pace of its military gains this year in the east of the country.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal of Ukraine said that 15 of the country’s 24 regions had been hit in what he called a “massive Russian attack” using cruise missiles, drones and other weapons. “There are wounded and dead,” he said, adding that Russia had also targeted the energy sector.
The Ukrainian minister of energy, Herman Halushchenko, told local news media that the attack had been a continuation of long-running strikes on energy infrastructure, causing emergency blackouts. “The enemy is not abandoning its plans to deprive Ukrainians of electricity,” he said.
Efforts to cripple Ukraine’s power grid began in the fall of 2022 and intensified in March of this year with strikes on power plants. Earlier attacks had aimed largely at transformer stations. By last month, nearly all Ukraine’s thermal power plants and a third of hydroelectric power stations had been destroyed.
Ukraine, which is ramping up production of an arsenal of domestically made, long-range exploding drones, has retaliated by blowing up fuel tanks and oil refineries in Russia.
Russia has been attacking Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones every few days in addition to daily barrages of artillery, mortar fire and missiles in areas near the front lines. On July 8, a missile slammed into Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, which is in Kyiv, putting it out of action without killing any children. On the same day, attacks across the capital killed more than 30 people.
On Monday, a Russian attack damaged an apartment building in the city of Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, the city’s mayor, Ihor Polishchuk, posted on social media. He later said that one person had been killed. A 69-year-old man also died in the Dnipropetrovsk region of southern Ukraine, according to the governor, Serhii Lysak, while the governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, Ivan Fedorov, said that a man had died in an attack there.
The Ukrainian casualty reports could not be confirmed independently and the Russian Defense Ministry, which typically remains silent about attacks it conducts against cities and other civilian targets in Ukraine, said nothing on its own Telegram channel.
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.
The war has also been deadly for news personnel. On Sunday, Reuters identified the security adviser who was killed in the hotel as Ryan Evans, without providing more information. A Reuters article said that Mr. Evans, 38, was a former soldier who had been working with the news agency since 2022.
On Monday, the Ukrainian authorities were struggling to cope with infrastructure problems apparently related to the air attacks. 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 outages.
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