At least 25 killed in Russian air raids on Ukraine cities

At least 25 civilians have been killed in a spate of Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities as Kiev said it was nearly ready to launch a massive strike to retake occupied land.

The attacks on the cities of Dnipro and Uman in the early hours of Friday were the first large-scale airstrikes in nearly two months.

Firefighters battled a fire in a residential apartment hit by a Russian missile in the central city of Uman and rescuers scrambled through a huge pile of smoldering rubble, searching for survivors and bodies as frightened people looked on.
Officials said at least 23 civilians were killed there, including four children.

Rescuers scrambled through a huge mound of smoldering rubble and carried a body away on a stretcher. A masked man sobbed as he watched, and a woman came to comfort him.

“There’s no one left,” said Serhii Lubivskyi, 58, who survived in a seventh-floor flat. He was rescued by firefighters from the balcony where he escaped with his wife after the explosion blocked their front door.

Lubivskyi cried as he took a deep drag on a cigarette and looked up at the smoldering holes in the building where neighboring flats had been blown away. “My neighbors are gone. There’s no one left,” he said. “Only the kitchens remained.”

Charles Stratford reporter for Al Jazeera from Kyiv said the attack was carried out by one of “23 cruise missiles and so-called kamikaze drones that Russia fired in the early hours of Friday morning,” according to the Ukrainian government. Some were reportedly launched from the Caspian Sea,” he said.

The attacks demonstrate “Russia’s ability to strike targets anywhere in this country whenever and wherever it wants,” he said.
The spate of overnight Russian missile strikes was the first since early March. Russia had launched such attacks on an almost weekly basis for most of the winter, but they lessened as spring arrived, with Western nations saying Moscow was running out of missiles.

Moscow said the targets of its night attacks were locations of Ukrainian reserve forces, which it successfully attacked, preventing them from reaching the front. It has provided no evidence for this.

In the southeastern city of Dnipro, a rocket hit a house, killing a two-year-old child and a 31-year-old woman, regional governor Serhiy Lysak said.

The capital Kiev was also rocked by explosions in the early hours, as were the central cities of Kremenchuk and Poltava, and Mykolaiv in the south. Two people were injured in the town of Ukrayinka just south of Kiev, officials said.

Ukrainian counteroffensive

The war comes at a crucial time after a months-long Russian winter offensive that gained little ground despite the bloodiest fighting yet. Kiev is preparing a counter-offensive using hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles sent by the West.

It wants to expel Russia from the nearly one-fifth of Ukraine it occupies and claims to have annexed.

“As soon as God’s will, the weather and a decision of commanders are there, we will do it,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleskii Reznikov said at an online news briefing Friday.

Ukraine was “a high percentage ready,” he said, with new modern weapons to provide an “iron fist.”

Cruise missiles

Closer to the front, in Donetsk, an eastern city controlled by Russian proxies since 2014, a Russian-installed official said seven people, including a child, had been killed by Ukrainian shelling that hit a minibus.

Reuters could not independently verify the number of victims or who was at fault. Ukrainian officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Ukrainian military said it had shot down 21 of 23 cruise missiles fired by Russia. Moscow has said it does not deliberately attack civilians. Kiev says attacks on cities far from the front lines have no military purpose other than to intimidate and harm civilians, a war crime.

“This Russian terror must receive a fair response from Ukraine and the world,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote in a Telegram post alongside images of the wreckage. “And it will.”

Along hundreds of miles of front, Russia has been fortifying its territory for months in anticipation of the planned attack on Kiev, which is widely expected once warmer weather dries up Ukraine’s notoriously sucking black mud.

Ukraine made rapid gains in the second half of 2022, but has kept its troops on the defensive for the past five months. Russia, meanwhile, launched a massive winter campaign with hundreds of thousands of newly drafted reservists and convicts recruited from prison as mercenaries.

But despite the heaviest ground fighting in Europe since World War II, Moscow gained little additional territory, concentrating mainly on the small mining town of Bakhmut, where Ukrainians resisted for nearly a year.