Russia launched a massive drone attack early yesterday, hitting critical infrastructure in the west and south of Ukraine and destroying private houses and commercial buildings in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, officials said.
The air force said it shot down 24 ‘Shahed’ drones out of 40 launched by Russia, the biggest drone attack in weeks to target Kharkiv in the northeast, Odesa and Kherson in the south and the region of Lviv on Ukraine’s border with Poland in the west.
One X-59 missile was also shot down, the air force said.
“We realise that as winter approaches, Russian terrorists will try to do more damage. We will respond to the enemy,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said of the attack, adding that air defences had been active in 10 different regions.
Officials say Ukraine is bracing for a second winter of Russian air strikes on the energy system, which they warn is more vulnerable than it was last year as it has less excess capacity and little in the way of spare equipment.
The air force said the latest drones were launched in several waves and flew to different regions in small groups. Air alerts in some regions lasted for several hours during the night.
Maksym Kozytskiy, Lviv’s governor, said an infrastructure facility had been hit five times during the attacks on his region, but did not elaborate on the damage. He reported no casualties.
In the nearby region of Ivano-Frankivsk a military facility was hit, governor Svitlana Onishchuk said.
Oleh Kiper, Odesa’s regional governor, reported a strike on an infrastructure facility in the southern region.
Oleh Synehubov, Kharkiv’s governor, said drones had hit civilian infrastructure and caused fires in and near the city of Kharkiv. He said eight people, including two children, required medical help due to acute stress.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said eight private houses, a three-storey building, several cars, and a car repair shop were damaged during the attack on Kharkiv.
Meanwhile, Russia yesterday dismissed new US sanctions over the war in Ukraine, saying that the United States would never defeat Moscow, while the boss of Russia’s fastest growing natural gas company quipped the sanctions were a badge of success.
The United States on Thursday targeted Russia’s future energy capabilities, sanctions evasion and a suicide drone that has been a menace to Ukrainian troops and equipment, among others, in sanctions on hundreds of people and entities.
“This is a continuation of the policy of inflicting as they call it - a strategic defeat on us,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, told Russian state television when asked about the new sanctions.
“They will have to wait in vain forever before that happens.”
Western leaders and Ukraine have repeatedly said they seek to defeat Russia on the battlefield, though some Western leaders have denied what President Vladimir Putin says is a Western plot to carve up Russia and steal its natural resources.
Putin is girding the $2.1 trillion economy for a long war and Western hopes of stoking a swift Russian economic crisis with some of the toughest sanctions ever imposed have not been realised.
The International Monetary Fund forecasts Russian growth of 2.2 per cent this year - faster than either the United States or the Euro area - though the Fund last month lowered its forecast for 2024 growth to 1.1pc.
The West has frozen hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian money, but Putin has joked that the sanctions have not stopped the import of Western goods such as luxury Mercedes to Russia and that Moscow will work to undermine the sanctions by buying what it wants on global markets.
The US, itself a large LNG producer that exports to Europe, is also trying to reduce Russia’s LNG shipments to Europe, which has only banned Russian gas sent via pipeline.
The Arctic-2 LNG project – targeted by the new sanctions – had been expecting to start exporting soon and it is uncertain how much Russian LNG will now be blocked.
The largest Russian LNG producer Novatek NVTK.MM said in September it would start shipments from Arctic-2 LNG early next year. Leonid Mikhelson, the head of Russian natural gas producer
Novatek, told a conference in the Uzbek city of Samarkand that the US sanctions were a badge “of our professionalism”.
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