2024-01-08 10:43:16
The war rages. Russia launched a large-scale missile attack on Ukraine before dawn on Monday, hitting residential and industrial facilities and injuring several people. The entire territory of Ukraine was under air raid alert around 6 a.m. local time (5 a.m. French time).
As a result of “a combined cruise and ballistic missile attack,” according to the head of the Zaporizhia military administration, at least five explosions were heard in the city at 7 a.m. Residential areas were hit and at least 4 people were injured and at least two died. Four rockets were launched at Kharkiv, notably damaging a school.
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In the South, the Ukrainian defense forces claim to have destroyed “eight enemy drones of the Shahed-131/136 type” overnight, sent by the Russians from the Black Sea towards the regions of Odessa and Mykolaiv. Debris from one of the downed drones fell on an open area in the Odessa district, causing a fire that was quickly extinguished.
At 7:16 a.m. local time, explosions were heard in Kryvy Rih, southern Ukraine. A little earlier, the air force had called on residents to take shelter after the takeoff of Russian MiG-31K fighters capable of carrying Kinjal air-to-ground hypersonic missiles nicknamed “daggers”. “The enemy is viciously attacking peaceful towns,” Oleksandr Vilkul, the mayor of Kryvyi Rih, said on the messaging app Telegram. The extent of the damage is not yet known. 15,000 of its citizens were already deprived of drinking water, electricity and heating due to the weakness of the electricity network, which cannot withstand the current extreme weather conditions.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have “intercepted” at 7 a.m. a Ukrainian S-200 air missile “over the Belgorod region”. The Russian region bordering Ukraine has been the target of retaliation by kyiv in recent days. 25 people were killed on December 30 in a Ukrainian attack, the deadliest civilian death toll on Russian soil since the start of Moscow’s offensive on February 24, 2022. Since then, Ukrainian attempts at attacks have multiplied, notably in missile assistance.
Faced with the threat, the governor of Belgorod on Friday suggested residents leave the most threatened areas. “About 300 residents of Belgorod, who decided to be temporarily evacuated, are now accommodated in reception centers in Stary Oskol, Gubkin and in the Korotchansky district”, further from the border, affirmed Vyacheslav Gladkov in a video posted on Telegram, adding that it had received “1,300 requests to send children from Belgorod to school camps outside the city, in other regions.”
This evacuation measure is unprecedented for a large city in Russia, while the Kremlin has been trying, for almost two years, to say that the war does not affect Russians. On Friday, residents of Belgorod were also invited, for the first time in two years, to secure their windows to “protect themselves” from possible shards of glass in the face of Ukrainian strikes. Regional authorities also postponed the start of the school year by ten days, which was due to take place on Tuesday.
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