Russia blasts Ukraine, including biggest use of advanced missiles

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia launched its biggest aerial barrage in weeks Thursday, blasting targets across Ukraine with a diverse array of weapons, including its newest hypersonic missiles, in what it said was retaliation for an armed incursion into Russian territory last week.

Volleys of missiles streaked into Kyiv and other cities overnight and in the pre-dawn, setting off air raid sirens and jarring people from their sleep with thunderous booms, and killing at least six people, Ukrainian officials said.

The strikes included six of the new Russian missiles known as Kinzhals, the most Russia has used in a single wave since the war began a year ago, according to Ukraine’s air force. They are hypersonic — meaning they travel at more than five times the speed of sound, and Russia has hinted at much higher speeds — and can maneuver in flight, making them all but impossible to shoot down.

Several missiles hit electrical power plants, damaging three of them, continuing a Russian campaign to black out Ukrainian cities and undermine morale, and Moscow’s forces followed their usual tactic of trying to overwhelm air defenses with waves of missiles of various kinds and drones fired at intervals through the night.

“It was a massive strike, from multiple directions, firing from the air and sea and with kamikaze drones,” Yurii Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s air force, said of the barrage, the latest of a dozen or so large-scale missile attacks that began in October.

Russia fired 81 cruise and ballistic missiles of nine types Thursday, from air, land and sea, along with eight Iranian-made exploding drones, the Ukrainian military said. Forty-seven missiles penetrated Ukrainian defenses and hit targets — a far higher success rate than in other major Russian missile attacks in recent months.

That was because the barrage used more than the usual number of high-speed missiles, including ballistic missiles and Kinzhals, that Ukraine has no ability to stop, and fewer of the relatively slower, more vulnerable cruise missiles that Ukrainians have become adept at shooting down, Ihnat said in an interview.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has estimated Russia had, before the volley fired Thursday, no more than 50 Kinzhals, Ihnat said. It was not clear why Moscow’s forces would have used such a large part of a limited supply of one of its most sophisticated weapons, one whose existence was first revealed five years ago and which was developed to breach American anti-missile defense systems.

“For one reason or another, they needed a result” this time, he said. He added the use of Kinzhals could also indicate Russia is “expending its strategic reserve” of alternatives.

More than a year of war has depleted Russia’s stocks of cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles. Russia has taken to using S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to hit targets on the ground, a role in which they are not very accurate. It has also bought attack drones from Iran, which are far less expensive but also less powerful and easier to shoot down, and has used many of them.

Five of the people killed in the attacks were in the western Lviv region bordering Poland, a region far from the front lines that has been spared the worst of the war’s barbarity but is well within reach of Russian missiles. The victims, three men and two women, were in their homes in the Zolochiv district when a missile struck around 4 a.m. local time, Maksym Kozytskyi, the head of the region’s military administration, said on the Telegram messaging app.

He said the attack started a fire that “destroyed three residential buildings, three cars, a garage and several outbuildings,” before being extinguished.