San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
UKRAINE: RUSSIA TARGETS KYIV WITH MISSILE, FIRST TIME IN WEEKS
Attack was part of broader aerial assault campaign
An investigator works at the site of a derailed cargo train in Ryazan region, Russia. The train was derailed Saturday morning by an improvised explosive device, Russian law enforcement said.
Ukraine’s military said Saturday that it had shot down a Russian ballistic missile hurtling toward Kyiv, the first such attack on the capital in weeks, while cities across the country were targeted by a Russian air barrage that damaged several buildings.
Ukrainian authorities said they had also shot down 19 drones out of 31 launched by Russian forces overnight. The fate of the other 12 drones remained unclear, but local officials reported damage in several areas after the attacks.
Two loud bangs were heard in Kyiv around 8 a.m. Saturday, and two trails of smoke were visible in the skies over the city before airraid sirens went off. Ukrainian officials said the booms were the work of air-defense systems that had destroyed the missile.
“After a long pause of 52 days, the enemy resumed missile attacks on Kyiv,” Serhii Popko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said in a statement, noting that drones had also targeted the city overnight. Officials said that all of the drones aimed at the capital had been shot down and that preliminary information did not indicate that the air raids had caused any damage or injuries.
It was not immediately clear what the missile heading for Kyiv was targeting. The attack came after months of warnings by Ukrainian authorities that Russia was likely to pound cities and focus on the power grid when cold weather began to bite, predicting a repeat of last year’s winter campaign against energy infrastructure.
Those attacks a year ago plunged Kyiv into cold and darkness, with residents at times forced to rely on flashlights, while local authorities planned for a possible evacuation of the city.
But Saturday’s assault was relatively limited in scale, suggesting that the attacks might instead have been part of what military analysts and Ukrainian army officials say is an effort by Russia to test Ukrainian air cover through multiple small-scale attacks.
Ukraine’s air defense systems actively repelled attacks in Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy, and Kirovohrad regions. The country’s air force said Russian troops launched 31 Shahed-136/131 drones, of which 19 were shot down.
The strike in the Odesa region damaged the city’s port infrastructure and a small community of cottages, injuring three people, including a 96-year-old woman, said regional governor Oleh Kiper.
Russian forces also launched an X-31 aircraft missile, an Onyx anti-ship missile, and an S-300 antiaircraft guided missile overnight, said Ukrainian military spokesperson Yuri Ihnat, but did not give further details.
Elsewhere in the Kyiv region, five residential buildings were damaged by a blast wave caused by two missiles that hit a field between two settlements, shattering roofs and windows, the military administration said.
In a statement, Mykola Oleshchuk, commander of the Ukrainian air force, congratulated the crews manning the Patriot air-defense systems that protect the skies over Kyiv for shooting down the ballistic missile.
But some residents were left to wonder why air-raid sirens had sounded only after the missile had been shot down.
Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force, said the alarm had come later because “ballistic missiles travel extremely fast” and were difficult to detect quickly with radars.
In Moscow, Russia’s defense ministry said that its aerial strikes had hit an ammunition depot serving the 43rd mechanized brigade of Ukraine’s Armed Forces near the village of Devichki in the Kyiv region. In an online statement, it said that Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the Smolensk and Moscow regions.
Smolensk governor Vasiliy Anokhin posted on social media that no one was wounded in the attack.
Meanwhile, freight cars carrying cargo in Russia’s Ryazan region were derailed Saturday morning by an improvised explosive device, Russian law enforcement said.
Nineteen carriages traveling from the town of Rybnoye were thrown from the tracks and 15 were damaged, investigators wrote in a statement on social media. They said they would be opening a criminal investigation on terrorism charges.