By Andrew E. Kramer and Marc Santora
Russia ramped up its deep strikes into Ukraine on Wednesday with a volley of missiles aimed at Kyiv and a northeastern border area, ending a more than two-month pause in such attacks on the capital, the Ukrainian air force said.
The missile bombardment came as Russian forces sought to press their advantage in both soldiers and firepower across the eastern front. Ukraine’s military on Wednesday reported a wave of aerial bombing targeting its troops holding a pocket of Russian territory near the northern border that was captured last summer.
As air raid alerts wailed in Kyiv around 6 a.m. and civilians headed for hallways or basements for safety, the Ukrainian air force said it was tracking 96 aerial targets entering the country’s airspace. That included missiles, ending an unusual 73-day pause in Russia’s use of the weapons to strike civilian and military targets in the capital.
The air force said four missiles were aimed at Kyiv and two were short-range missiles fired into the northeastern border area.
The city has in that period come under numerous drone attacks. Scores of drones were also used in the attack Wednesday, the air force said.
Across Ukraine, the past few months have also seen a longer than usual break from large-scale missile attacks. The last major missile attack came Sept. 3, with a strike on a military academy in the eastern Ukrainian city of Poltava that killed more than 50 people.
Military analysts had speculated that Russia was stockpiling missiles for use after the onset of freezing weather, which can wreak additional havoc in a city after a strike if heating is knocked out and water pipes freeze. The season’s first snowstorm swept over central Ukraine on Wednesday.
Also Wednesday, Russia said a senior Russian naval officer was killed in the city of Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea after a bomb planted under his car exploded.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, which is responsible for investigating serious crimes, said it was considering the death as an act of terrorism. It did not name the officer.
An official at Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the SBU, speaking about clandestine operations on the condition of anonymity, said the killed officer had been in charge of cruise missile launches from the Black Sea, identifying him as Valeriy Trankovsky.
In Kyiv, explosions rang out early Wednesday and authorities said air defense systems were firing at incoming missiles and drones.
In the attack, Russia synchronized the arrival in the capital of fast-flying ballistic missiles and slower-moving cruise missiles, a common tactic. The Kyiv city military administration initially said North Korean-made Hwasong ballistic missiles may have been used. But Ukraine’s air force later reported that two Russian-made Iskander-M ballistic missiles were shot down.
In Kyiv on Wednesday, falling debris started fires in the city’s suburbs and wounded one person, local authorities reported. Two short-range S-300 air defense missiles that had been repurposed by Russia for ground attack were also fired over Ukraine’s northeastern border, the air force said. It provided no details on what they targeted.
Russia also launched 90 drones, including Iranian-designed Shahed one-way attack drones.
The pause in missile strikes had left residents of the capital on edge, as they anxiously waited for them to resume. The last significant damage from missiles in Kyiv came in July, when they hit a children’s hospital and a maternity clinic.
On the country’s northeastern border with Russia, Ukraine has been bracing for a combined North Korean and Russian ground offensive after at least 11,000 North Korean soldiers arrived in the area in recent weeks, joining Russian infantry units to create a combined force of about 50,000 soldiers, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Brussels on Wednesday for meetings with NATO and European officials to discuss Ukraine’s war against Russia, addressed the issue of the North Korean troops. They had been “injected into the battle,” he said, “which demands and will get a firm response.”
The troops assembled by Russia are expected to try to dislodge the Ukrainians from a pocket of Russian turf captured over the summer. Ground assaults and aerial bombardments against Ukrainian positions have begun. On Tuesday, Russia dropped 50 guided bombs on the Ukrainian-controlled area, Col. Vadym Mysnyk, a military spokesperson, told Ukrainian media.
The missile bombardment of the capital also came as Russia presses attacks in eastern Ukraine, with much of the most ferocious fighting concentrated in the Donetsk region.
Russian troops are now threatening to encircle the Ukrainian garrison in the industrial town of Kurakhove, having reached the eastern edge of the city, according to soldiers, volunteers and combat footage.
On Monday, Russians tried an amphibious assault on the town across the freezing waters of a reservoir, using small inflatable boats, but were repulsed, according to the 46th Airmobile Brigade. The attack coincided with a mechanized assault. The brigade released video showing the destruction of three tanks and six infantry fighting vehicles. The extent of the fighting and reported damage could not be independently verified.
Russians are close to cutting off the main road supplying Ukrainian forces in the area, threatening large groups of soldiers who are defending the town. The approach to Kurakhove is lined with burned-out cars and the town itself has been steadily blasted into oblivion.
The blowing up of a dam on the northwestern edge of the reservoir, which Ukraine blamed on Russian forces, is now complicating efforts to evacuate the civilians in villages downstream, as floodwaters steadily rose this week.
But even without rising waters, the drones that saturate the skies increasingly made all movement in and around the town deadly, people in the area said.
“They strike anywhere,” said Yaroslav Chernyshov, 20, a volunteer with the charity Children New Generation, who was helping to evacuate civilians in the area. “Civilian cars are just as shattered as military ones.”
He said he recently lost a colleague in a drone attack during a mission to pick up a woman with a 2-month-old baby.
A colleague in a second car was hit by a drone and died, he said. “We tried to resuscitate him and managed to get him to a stabilization point alive, but sadly, he didn’t make it.”
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