Finance
According to media reports, air raid sirens rang out across Ukraine on Thursday morning as Russia launched around 120 missiles in a savage barrage targeting the capital Kyiv and several other major cities.
“A massive air raid. More than 100 missiles in several waves,” presidential office adviser Oleksiy Arestovych wrote on Facebook, while another adviser Mykhailo Podolyak claimed more than 120 missiles had been fired at Ukraine, Daily Mail reported.
The mayors of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv in western Ukraine all reported that Russian missiles had caused a series of explosions, while blasts were also heard in Zhytomyr, Odesa, and Dnipropetrovsk, according to local media reports.
The brutal blitz followed the Kremlin’s rejection of a Ukrainian peace plan, with both Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov insisting that Kyiv accept Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions, according to the Daily Mail.
The strikes in Kyiv on Thursday evoked scenes from the Second World War, as thousands of people sought refuge in the city’s metro tunnels.
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russia launched an overnight assault of ‘kamikaze’ drones, followed by waves of air- and sea-based cruise missiles.
The widespread attack was the latest in a string of Russian strikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.
Since October, Moscow has launched such attacks on a weekly basis, causing widespread blackouts and cutting off water supplies.
Podolyak said that Russia was aiming to “destroy critical infrastructure and kill civilians en masse”.
“We’re waiting for further proposals from ‘peacekeepers’,” he wrote ironically on Twitter, Daily Mail reported.
Kharkiv’s Governor Oleg Synegubov said “critical infrastructure” was targeted in the region and four missiles hit civilian neighbourhoods in the east and south of the city, while Kyiv’s Vitali Klitschko claimed that “40 per cent of the capital’s consumers are without electricity after the Russian attack”.
Source:OCN
