Russia targets Ukraine with large-scale missile attack

Russia attacked Ukraine with several waves of missiles Saturday morning, the Ukrainian and Russian militaries said, putting the entire country under an air raid alert and sending people rushing for shelter as bangs were heard in several cities.

The attack, which started around 5 a.m. local time and lasted about three hours, involved nearly 40 cruise and hypersonic missiles fired from different regions, including the Russian-occupied peninsula of Crimea and the Caspian Sea, to the southeast of Ukraine. They were directed at cities including Kyiv, the capital, and Lviv, near the border with Poland.

It followed Russia's recent strategy for largescale air assaults: waves of different types of aerial weapons launched almost simultaneously from multiple locations and aimed at various targets, with the goal of overwhelming Ukrainian air defenses.

The Ukrainian air force said that it had shot down eight missiles — a low interception rate compared with previous assaults — but that more than 20 other missiles and drones had missed their targets because of electronic jamming. Russia's Defense Ministry said in a statement that its missiles had hit “Ukrainian military-industrial complex facilities” that produce shells, gunpowder and drones. Neither of the claims could be independently verified.

The assault was part of an air campaign that Russia began in late December, targeting industrial and military infrastructure, and repeatedly hitting civilian areas in the process. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has said that Russia launched about 500 missiles and drones against his country in attacks around the New Year's holidays.

On Saturday, local authorities reported explosions, some of which may have been caused by Ukrainian air defenses, in cities such as Kremenchuk and Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine. Oleksiy Kuleba, the deputy head of Ukraine's presidential office, said that the “mass attack” had caused damage to civilian buildings in three regions but that there had been no casualties.

Saturday's attack was the fourth large-scale nationwide assault against Ukraine in about two weeks.