Russia launched what is likely to be a prolonged air attack on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure facilities on Wednesday, the HUR military intelligence agency said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had earlier warned of possible waves of Russian drone attacks throughout the day, saying that more than 100 drones were in Ukraine’s airspace.
HUR said that, in a first wave, Russia was using a large number of drones to try to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defence system and that it planned to use a significant number of missiles, including ballistic ones, later.
It did not give a timeframe for the attack but warned in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that it could be prolonged.
Moscow’s targets are critical infrastructure and essential services in major cities, including energy, defence industry facilities and government buildings, the agency said.
Air force issues warnings to several regions
The scale of the attack was not immediately clear, but Ukraine’s air force issued warnings of groups of drones heading towards several Ukrainian regions.
Since the beginning of the war more than four years ago, Russia has mainly carried out major drone and missile strikes at night. In recent months, however, it has more frequently sent hundreds of drones and missiles during the daytime.
Serhiy Beskrestnov, an adviser to the defence minister, said Wednesday’s attack showed that Russia was trying to change its tactics of using drones every time.
This time, large numbers of drones were moving along between 5 km and 10 km from the Belarus border, to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defence system so that as many as possible could get through to the west of the country, he said.
The western Khmelnytskyi region came under attack, the regional governor said, adding that three people had been wounded.
In the southern city of Kherson, which regularly comes under Russian shelling and drone attacks, six passengers and a driver were wounded in a Russian drone attack on a city bus, a local official said.
According to preliminary information, two people were also wounded in the attack in the southern city of Odesa, the regional governor said.
In Kyiv, drone debris fell on an open territory in the northern Obolon district, the city’s mayor said.
Ukraine’s air force reported that Russia attacked the country with 139 drones overnight since 6 p.m. (1500 GMT) on Tuesday, of which 111 were downed or neutralised.
Moscow denies intentionally targeting civilians but has killed thousands of them during the war, and says strikes on civil infrastructure are legitimate if they degrade Ukraine’s ability to fight the war. Kyiv has lately intensified long-range attacks on Russia’s energy industry, though on a smaller scale.