Ukraine ‘issues air alert across the whole country’ as Russia launches wave of attacks
Ukraine issued an air alert across the whole country, just hours after Russia launched a widespread overnight missile and drone attack.
The sirens may have been triggered by a Russian warplane carrying Kinzhal hypersonic weapons, according to Ukrainian military bloggers.
Meanwhile, Ukraine air defences shot down 35 Iranian-made drones over Kyiv in the latest volley of attacks. Russia has had to regularly call on friends in Iran to boost its firearms, deploying their Shahed drones to compensate for the sanctions on its supply chains from elsewhere in the world.
Three civilians were killed in the Russian raid, Ukrainian officials said on Monday, as Moscow enforced tighter security the night before their traditional Red Square commemorations, marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
Five people in the capital were injured by falling drone debris, according to Serhii Popko, head of the Kyiv City Military Administration.
Exploded drones struck an apartment building in Kyiv’s western Svyatoshynskyi district, while a nearby parked car was set on fire by falling debris, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, writing on Telegram.
The Kremlin’s forces used tanks, drones, mortars, warplanes, multiple rocket launchers and surface-to-air missiles to bombard Ukraine, the Associated Press reported, while long-range bombers launched up to eight cruise missiles at Ukraine’s southern Odesa region.
However, some of the cruise missiles fired were Soviet-era models, and self-destructed or collapsed into the sea before reaching their targets, according to Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuri Ihnat.
Overnight, six Russian rockets also struck the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk during the night, a regional official reported Monday.
The missiles targeted the city’s industrial zone but caused no casualties, Donetsk regional governor Petro Kyrylenko said in a Telegram post.
The attack comes amid fears of nuclear risk, following the panicked evacuation of the controversial Zaporizhzhia power plant.
Russian authorities have been evacuating residents of Tokmak, a town in the Zaporizhzhia region, towards the Black Sea coast, Ukraine’s General Staff said.
Those working for Kremlin-appointed local authorities, as well as children and adults working in education, are being relocated to Berdyansk, a Russian-occupied city on the coast.
The report came days after Yevhen Balitsky, the Russian governor of the region, ordered the evacuation of civilians from 18 neighbouring villages on Friday.
The region is understood to be a likely target for Ukraine’s anticipated spring counter-offensive.
On Saturday, Russian shelling killed six civilians and injured four others in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, according to a Telegram update published by the local administration on Sunday.
Five civilians were injured in the eastern Donetsk region, the locus of unrest in recent months, local governor Pavlo Kyrylenko reported on Sunday morning.
Ukrainian forces attacked the largest port in the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula with drones overnight on Saturday, according to a Kremlin local official posting on Telegram early on Sunday.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said Moscow had launched 16 missile strikes on cities and regions including Kharkiv, Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa, with 52 instances of enemy shelling.
President Volodymyr Zelensky marked the anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany in the Second World War by announcing he would formalise a day of remembrance in Ukraine on 8 May, when other Western countries celebrate Europe’s victory.
Speaking to the nation on a hill overlooking Kyiv, Mr Zelensky said “the old evil” had returned, this time waged by a “modern Russia” pursuing the same goal as the Nazis of “enslavement and destruction” – but that they would not succeed.
