Kyiv, Ukraine — A series of explosions rocked Kyiv early Monday morning, with some attacks in the heart of the Ukrainian capital’s downtown during rush hour, and rocket attacks hitting cities across the country: the apparent Russia’s revenge for an explosion on the Crimean bridge on Saturday. .
Suspected Russian missiles caused loud explosions around 8:15 a.m. and vehicles were on fire near Taras Shevchenko Park, on a road often jammed with rush hour traffic.
At least five people were killed, and at least a dozen others were injured in the attacks, Ukraine’s national police reported on its Telegram channel.
Explosions were reported in other major cities in Ukraine on Monday, including in Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Lviv, as Moscow launched a missile barrage.
In Kyiv, the strikes came in waves, the first attack on the city since June. But even when Russian forces were on the outskirts of the capital in the early months of the war, no attack had hit the city center so directly.
Suddenly, the gleeful jeers that characterized Ukraine’s national elation over the fireball at the Crimean bridge were replaced on Monday by fury and outrage, accusations of terrorism against Moscow and a redoubled determination to overcome the aggression. and defeat the invaders.
Parallel to the first days of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky released a video of himself standing in the center of Kyiv, outside the presidential office, to address the citizens.
“The morning is hard,” Zelensky said. “We are dealing with terrorists.”
“Always remember,” he added, “Ukraine existed before this enemy appeared, and Ukraine will exist after him.”
In Moscow, where he called a meeting of his security council, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted of a “massive strike” with precision weapons in retaliation for the bridge explosion, and warned of further attacks if Ukraine continued to strike Russian targets.
“In the event that Ukrainian acts of terrorism continue on Russian territory, our response will be tough and, in terms of its scale, will correspond to the level of threats,” Putin said.
Russia’s attacks in the heart of the capital raised questions about the strength of Ukraine’s air defenses, which officials have been pressing Western countries to bolster with additional security aid. The Ukrainian military reported that its air defenses had shot down 43 of the 83 missiles fired at the country on Monday.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Kyiv was contacting its Western allies to organize a response to Monday’s strikes. “I am in constant contact with partners since early this morning to coordinate a decisive response to the Russian attacks,” Kuleba posted on Twitter. “I am also interrupting my tour of Africa and returning to Ukraine immediately.”
The strikes appeared to be retaliation for Saturday’s attack on the bridge across the Kerch Strait, which has been partially reopened, including to rail traffic. The Crimean bridge is a strategic link between mainland Russia and Crimea and a symbol of Putin’s ambitions to annex Ukrainian territory.
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Putin blamed Ukrainian special services for the attack.
“There is no doubt that the attack was aimed at destroying the critical civilian infrastructure of the Russian Federation,” Putin said in a video released by the Kremlin on Sunday. The 12-mile span, though used by civilians, is a crucial military logistics conduit for the Russian military, the only direct road and rail route from mainland Russia to Crimea, which the Kremlin invaded and annex illegally in 2014.
“And now the answer has come,” Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-run RT channel, wrote on Twitter. “The Crimean bridge from the beginning was that red line. It was obvious.”
Putin has been under pressure to up the ante in what the Kremlin calls his “special military operation” in Ukraine after a succession of recent battlefield failures. In the past six weeks, Ukraine has routed Russian forces from the northeastern region of Kharkiv and pushed them back into the eastern Donbas region and the southern Kherson region.
But while hitting Kyiv may please Russian hardliners who have called for more attacks on the capital, it will not reverse Russia’s core strategic programs, including losses of soldiers and equipment, low morale and repeated logistical failures.
The attacks followed Russia’s announcement on Saturday that General Sergei Surovikin had been appointed overall commander of the war in Ukraine. Surovikin is a veteran officer who led the Russian military expedition to Syria in 2017, which included indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.
Moscow’s longtime leader of Crimea called the flurry of strikes in Ukraine “good news.”
“Good news from early in the morning: the approaches to carrying out the special military operation have changed,” regional chief Sergey Aksyonov wrote on Telegram. “I have said since the first day of the operation that if these actions aimed at destroying the enemy’s infrastructure had been carried out every day, then we would have finished everything by May and the Kyiv regime would have been defeated.”
“I hope that now the pace of the operation will not slow down,” Aksyonov said.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the North Caucasus region of Chechnya who has repeatedly called for an escalation of the war in Ukraine and sent hundreds of fighters to the front, said he was now “100 percent satisfied” with the strategy of Moscow War .
Monday’s strikes shattered the sense of relative peace Kyiv has experienced since April, when Ukrainian troops pushed Russian forces back from the region’s northern borders.
Reports of explosions going off across the country for several hours date back to the first day of the war, when Russia tried to eliminate Ukrainian military installations to set the stage for the invasion. On Monday, however, the targets appeared to be mostly civilians.
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About 90 minutes after the first explosions rocked the capital, emergency workers and military personnel lined up around an intersection that was hit in central Kyiv. The site is adjacent to a major university complex and Taras Shevchenko Park, which is popular with families. One of the missiles landed in the park yard.
The burnt hulls of several cars remained, and at least one body bag was visible on the pavement. Glass from the building’s shattered windows littered the sidewalk.
Another missile hit a glass pedestrian bridge in central Kyiv that had been a popular spot for tourists.
Kyiv is back to normal life in the months since Russia failed to seize the capital and overthrow the government. People routinely ignored air raid sirens while sitting in outdoor cafes and walking around town.
After the initial start of the war prompted many foreign governments to evacuate embassy staff, embassies were gradually reopened. The United States reopened its embassy in May. It was unclear whether Monday’s bombing would prompt those countries to reconsider.
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In the western city of Lviv, home to thousands of displaced Ukrainians because it is far from the front lines, the missiles hit a power plant and cut off electricity and hot water in some places, the mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, said , on Twitter.
“They are trying to destroy us and wipe us off the face of the earth,” Zelensky said on Telegram. “Destroy our people who sleep at home in Zaporizhzhia. Kill people who go to work in Dnipro and Kyiv.”
Khurshudyan reported from Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. Kostiantyn Khudov in Kyiv and Mary Ilyushina in Riga, Latvia contributed to this report.
War in Ukraine: what you need to know
The last: Russian President Vladimir Putin signed decrees on Friday to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine, following referendums that were widely denounced as illegal. Follow our live updates here.
The answer: The Biden administration announced a new round of sanctions on Russia on Friday in response to the annexations, targeting government officials and their relatives, Russian and Belarusian military officials and defense procurement networks. President Volodymyr Zelensky also said Friday that Ukraine is seeking “accelerated accession” to NATO, in an apparent response to the annexations.
In Russia: Putin declared a military mobilization on September 21 to call up up to 300,000 reservists in a dramatic bid to reverse the setbacks in his war against Ukraine. The announcement led to an exodus of more than 180,000 people, most of whom were conscripted men, and renewed protests and other acts of defiance against the war.
The fight: Ukraine mounted a successful counteroffensive that forced a major Russian retreat in the northeastern Kharkiv region in early September, as troops fled towns and villages they had occupied since the first days of the war and abandoned large amounts of military equipment.
Pictures: Washington Post photographers have been on the ground since the beginning of the war; here are some of his most powerful works.
How you can help: Here are ways that those in the United States can support the Ukrainian people, as well as what people around the world have given.
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