(Kyiv) A new airstrike targeted Kyiv on Monday at dawn, after a New Year’s Day marked by dozens of Russian strikes that left at least four people dead in the capital and elsewhere in the country.
“Stay in the shelters! asked Sergey Popko, head of the military administration of the city of Kyiv, on Telegram. “12 aerial targets were shot down over the capital,” the administration said.
“All emergency services are on the way,” wrote the mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko, who reported explosions in the Desnyanskyi district, in the northeast of the capital, adding that a A 19-year-old man was injured by flying glass and taken to hospital.
The bombings that occurred shortly before and after the transition to 2023, on Kyiv and seven other regions, had already left at least four dead and 50 injured, according to the Ukrainian authorities.
For its part, Moscow claimed to have targeted unmanned aircraft manufacturing facilities.
In central Kyiv, a missile tore open the facade of a hotel on New Year’s Eve, while local police chief Andriï Nebitov posted a photograph on Facebook showing what appears to be the remains of a a drone with the words “Happy New Year” written in Russian.
The Ukrainian Air Force, for its part, announced that it had shot down during the night from Saturday to Sunday 45 Shahed explosive drones, manufactured by Iran and launched by Russia, without specifying whether some of them had reached their target.
“We will not give them anything”
Then, during the day on Sunday, “the enemy carried out 35 air strikes, using in particular the Shahed-136 drone”, and all the devices fired by Russia were destroyed, announced in the evening the staff of the Ukrainian army.
PHOTO GLEB GARANICH, REUTERS
Ukrainian servicemen use searchlights to search the skies of Kyiv for drones during a Russian drone attack.
“The Russian occupiers”, he added, also “fired 16 times with multiple rocket launchers, in particular at the children’s hospital in Kherson”, a southern city regularly bombarded since it was taken over in the fall by Ukrainian soldiers.
[Les Russes] are losing. Drones, missiles and everything else won’t help them. Because we are together.
Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine
“And they won’t take a single year away from Ukraine, they won’t take away our independence. We won’t give them anything. We respond to every Russian strike […] on all our cities and our communities,” insisted Volodymyr Zelensky.
Russia, for its part, assured that it had carried out on the night of Saturday to Sunday “a long-range precision airborne attack against Ukrainian defense industry facilities involved in the manufacture of attack drones used to carry out terrorist attacks against Russia”.
Moscow often describes Ukrainian military operations on Russian territory or against Russian infrastructure in Ukraine as “terrorist acts”.
“Incredibly tired”
The Russian army has also declared that it is continuing its offensive in the Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine, where most of the fighting is currently concentrated.
In this regard, the General Staff of the Ukrainian forces underlined on Sunday evening that “the enemy […] continued to attempt attacks in the Bakhmout sector”, a city in this region which the Russians have been trying to seize for more than six months, at the cost of heavy losses on both sides and unimaginable destruction.
The soldiers engaged in this battle are subjected to an “incredible fatigue” moral and physical. And in this endless war of attrition, some end up seeing themselves “like meat, just fit to be sent to death”, explained on the spot to AFP Mark Kouptchenenko, a young Ukrainian military chaplain who will all days at the front.
There are no or very few rotations, “they are constantly in combat”, under enormous pressure, subject to orders that sometimes they no longer understand, he further said.
On the pro-Russian side, the authorities of the separatist territories in eastern Ukraine reported the death of a civilian in Ukrainian bombardments on Sunday in Yassynouvata in the Donetsk region.
According to them, Ukrainian forces also struck Donetsk and the nearby town of Makiivka just after midnight, injuring at least 15 people.
