Russia launches hundreds of missiles and drones at Ukraine in ‘biggest attack of war’

Russia has launched a major barrage of missiles and drones across Ukraine , killing four people, injuring more than a dozen and damaging energy facilities in what has been called its biggest attack of the war.

The bombardment, condemned as “vile” by Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky , involved the firing of more than 100 missiles and a similar number of drones at more than half the country on Monday, with Ukraine’s air force commander describing it as Moscow’s biggest air assault of the war so far.

In attacks that began at around midnight and continued through daybreak, Ukraine’s air force said swarms of Russian drones fired at eastern, northern, southern and central regions were followed by volleys of cruise and ballistic missiles.

“Like most previous Russian strikes, this one was just as vile, targeting critical civilian infrastructure,” Mr Zelensky said, adding that most of the country was targeted, from the Kharkiv region and Kyiv to Odesa and the west.

Russian forces fired drones, cruise missiles and hypersonic ballistic Kinzhal missiles at 15 Ukrainian regions, damaging a number of the areas, Ukraine’s prime minister Denys Shmyhal said.

“The energy infrastructure has once again become the target of Russian terrorists,” he said, adding that Ukraine’s state-owned power grid operator, Ukrenergo, was forced to implement emergency power cuts to stabilise the system.

He also called on Ukraine’s allies to provide Kyiv with long-range weapons and permission to use them on targets inside Russia, vowing to “make Russia pay”.

“In order to stop the barbaric shelling of Ukrainian cities, it is necessary to destroy the place from which the Russian missiles are launched,” Mr Shmyhal said. “We count on the support of our allies and will definitely make Russia pay.”

The commander of Ukraine’s air force said forces had downed 102 out of 127 missiles and 99 out of 109 drones. Mykola Oleshchuk called the combined strike “the biggest air attack” in a statement on Telegram.

Explosions were heard in Kyiv on Monday, and power and water supplies in the Ukrainian capital were disrupted by the attack, the city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

At least four people were killed – one in the western city of Lutsk, one in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, one in Zhytomyr in the country’s centre and one in the partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region in the southeast, according to local officials.

Thirteen other people were wounded – one in the Kyiv region that surrounds the Ukrainian capital, five in Lutsk, three in the southern Mykolaiv region and four in the neighbouring Odesa region.

Blackouts and damage to civilian infrastructure and residential buildings were reported across the country, from the region of Sumy in the east to the Mykolaiv and Odesa regions in the south, to the region of Rivne in the west.

In Sumy, a province in the east that borders Russia, local officials said 194 settlements had suffered a full power blackout, while 19 others had a partial blackout.

Ukraine’s private energy company DTEK introduced emergency blackouts, saying in an online statement that “energy workers throughout the country work 24/7 to restore light in the homes of Ukrainians”.

In the wake of the barrage and the power cuts, regional officials across Ukraine were ordered to open “points of invincibility” – shelter-type places where people can charge their devices and get refreshments during energy blackouts, Prime Minister Shmyhal said.

Such points were first opened in Ukraine in the autumn of 2022 when Russia targeted the country’s energy infrastructure with weekly barrages.

In neighbouring Poland, the military said Polish and Nato air defences were activated in the eastern part of the country as a result of the attack.

Meanwhile, in Russia, officials reported a Ukrainian drone attack overnight and on Monday morning.

Four people were injured in the central region of Saratov, where drones hit residential buildings in two cities.

One drone crashed into a residential high-rise in the city of Saratov, and another hit a residential building in the city of Engels, home to a military airfield that had been attacked before, local officials said.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said that a total of 22 Ukrainian drones were intercepted overnight and in the morning over eight Russian regions, including the Saratov and Yaroslavl regions in central Russia.