A series of blasts rocked Kyiv on Monday morning, with some strikes landing in the heart of the Ukrainian capital’s downtown during rush hour, and rocket attacks were reported in cities across the country, as Russia apparently sought to take revenge for the explosion Saturday on the Crimean Bridge.
Videos posted to social media showed civilian cars on fire near Taras Shevchenko Park — on a busy road often jammed with rush-hour traffic — when suspected Russian missiles landed at around 8:15 a.m.
The number of casualties was unclear, but President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram that there were dead and wounded.
The attack marks the first on Kyiv since June, but even when Russian forces were on the outskirts of the capital in the early months of the war, no attack has hit this deep into the city center.
Explosions were reported across other Ukrainian regional capitals on Monday, including in Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro and Lviv, as Moscow unleashed a barrage of missiles in apparent retribution for Saturday’s attack on the bridge across the Kirch Strait, a strategic link between mainland Russia and Crimea and a symbol of President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to annex Ukrainian territory.
Putin blamed Ukrainian special services for the attack on Sunday.
“There is no doubt that the attack was aimed at destroying critical civilian infrastructure of the Russian Federation,” Putin said in a video released by the Kremlin on Sunday. The 12-mile long span, while used by civilians, is also a crucial military logistics conduit for Russia’s armed forces, the only direct road and rail route from mainland Russia to Crimea, which the Kremlin invaded and illegally annexed in 2014.
Monday’s missile strikes shattered the sense of relative peace that Kyiv has experienced since April, when Ukrainian troops pushed Russian forces to retreat from the northern edges of the region.
The city has come back to life in the months since, and people have regularly ignored air-raid alert sirens while at cafes and walking around town. Foreign diplomats, who had evacuated the city in the early days of the war have all returned, and many were posting reports about the strikes on Monday, while urging their diplomatic teams to seek safety.
Russia’s strikes on the center of the Ukrainian capital raised questions about the strength of Ukraine’s air defenses, Ukrainian officials have been pushing Western countries to help improve through additional security assistance.
“They are trying to destroy us and wipe us off the face of the earth,” Zelensky said in a statement on Telegram. “Destroy our people who are sleeping at home in Zaporizhzhia. Kill people who go to work in Dnipro and Kyiv.”
Source: The Washington Post
BDST: 1352 HRS, OCT 10, 2022
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