KYIV, Jan 3,2024: Russia pounded Ukraine’s two biggest cities on Tuesday in a new wave of heavy air strikes that killed at least five civilians and prompted calls for the West to quickly provide more military assistance.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said 135 people had been injured in the latest missile and drone attacks, including 61 in and around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city in the northeast and 17 in and around the capital, Kyiv.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said rescue operations continued into the late evening as the assaults also caused widespread damage and hit power supplies.
Russia has intensified attacks over the New Year period, with President Vladimir Putin warning on Monday that a Ukrainian air strike on the Russian city of Belgorod, which Moscow said killed 25 civilians, would “not go unpunished”.
Smoke belched out of the charred side of a high-rise residential building in Kyiv where mayor Vitali Klitschko said an elderly woman had been killed and 49 people hurt. Emergency services later recovered another corpse from the building.
A 91-year-old woman was killed in a missile strike on Kharkiv that also wounded dozens and a married couple was killed in an attack in the area around Kyiv, local officials said.
“Russia will answer for every life (that it has) taken away,” Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messenger. Russia later said one man had been killed and 11 people injured in a series of attacks on Belgorod.
Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address, later said Russia had deployed almost 300 missiles and more than 200 drones in attacks over the last three days. The latest assaults, he said were intended to cause maximum destruction.
“…The trajectories have been specially calculated by the enemy to cause as much damage as possible,” he said. “No other country has yet repelled similar attacks by combined drones and missiles, including ballistic missiles.”
Russia stepped up missile and drone strikes on Dec. 29, when it launched its largest air attack of the war, killing at least 39 people. Kyiv had warned for weeks that Russia appeared to be stockpiling missiles for big attacks.
