Russia had been accumulating its most advanced missiles for almost three months for a new phase of large-scale bombing. This is what the Ukrainian authorities have been warning about for weeks and it has been so. The invading forces fired 120 rockets and 90 Shahed bomb drones this Sunday against the Ukrainian energy network throughout the country, as reported by the president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The previous attack, hundreds of kilometers from its objectives, 117 missiles and 109 bomb drones.
The Russian operation lasted from three in the morning to eight in the morning and involved airplanes, ships in the Black Sea that fired Kalibr cruise rockets, and also land bases with ballistic missiles in Crimea and Russia. Zelensky has reported that 140 of the 210 Shahed missiles fired have been intercepted, indicating 66% effectiveness. In the previous massive bombing, in August, the kill rate was 88%.
The Ukrainian General Staff has been warning this year that Russia is perfecting the Shahed, originally Iranian, but now self-produced, with better guidance, flight and explosive charge systems. The Air Force has detailed that they have shot down less than half of the Shahed fired this Sunday, but, instead, they have destroyed 70% of the missiles. The objective in a combined attack with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones that enter the airspace at the same time is that the drones, above all, help to saturate anti-aircraft defenses.
The death toll at the beginning of the morning was two dead in Mikolaiv, according to Zelensky, although the figure later increased to seven dead throughout the country, according to the Reuters agency. The Russian bombing has been with its most precise missiles: the Kalibr, Kinzhal, Iskander and Zircon. The attack has also caused several injuries and the destruction of numerous homes and businesses due to the fall of the downed missiles. The enormous noise of the explosions of Kinzhal and Zircon hypersonic missiles surprised the citizens of kyiv early in the morning, when they were intercepted by anti-aircraft defenses. The shock waves have even shaken buildings in the center of the capital.
Zircon, hypersonic missiles fired by the Russian fleet, have been rarely used by the Kremlin in this war. The first use of Zircon was identified last February. They are, along with the Kinzhal, the most advanced hypersonic rockets in the Russian arsenal, and it was believed that it was almost impossible to intercept them until the Ukrainian Air Force demonstrated otherwise by shooting them down with American Patriot air defense batteries.
In the last three months, the Shahed have been the main Russian weapon for large-scale bombings. Zelensky said this November that Russia had fired ten times as many long-range drones this fall as in the same period last year. The shooting rate of these has fallen drastically, in part because the Shahed only fly without an apparent objective, but, as Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat has reiterated, their function is also to identify the location of their air defense units.
thousand days of war
The large-scale Russian attack occurs as the 1,000 days of invasion are about to expire. Mattias Schmale, head of the United Nations delegation in Ukraine, by wanting to destroy the energy network. Schmale estimated that the country has been left without 65% of its electricity generation capacity. This figure is slightly better than the almost 80% loss estimated last spring, in another intense phase of bombings against the electrical grid. Ukraine has managed, partly thanks to the help of the European Union countries, to restore part of its energy system, in addition to an increase in electricity imports from the EU.
Schmale warned of the possibility of a new Russian campaign to leave Ukrainian citizens without basic supplies: “It may be a turning point that [Rusia] force a new massive displacement of people inside and outside the country. It is not just a question of technical solutions, it is necessary to urge the international community to contribute its efforts to stop this war.”
“This is the true response of the war criminal Vladimir Putin to those who have recently met with him and who have called him,” Andrii Sibiga, Ukrainian Foreign Minister, wrote in a statement. Sibiga thus refers to . It also implicitly mentions the presence of numerous international leaders, and also that of the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, at the summit of the BRIC countries last October in Russia. Both Guterres and Scholz have been harshly criticized by the Ukrainian authorities. Zelensky accused the chancellor of “opening Pandora’s box” by agreeing to speak with Putin and give him the opportunity to break his international isolation. The chancellor defended the call this Sunday, in which he confirmed that the Russian leader’s position has basically not changed.
In August and October, information was published in The Washington Post y Financial Times of a possible secret negotiation between Moscow and kyiv, with Qatar as mediator, to stop attacks against their energy sectors. Neither side confirmed the information — the Kremlin even denied it was true — and both sides have continued their operations. The Ukrainian side is focused on hitting the Russian oil and gas industry with its drones.
Zelensky assessed on Saturday in an interview with Suspenseful that the country is better prepared to face this winter than in the previous two during the war. For now, the emergency power cuts caused by the bombing this Saturday have been limited to some regions of the provinces of kyiv, Dnipro, Odessa and Donetsk, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy.
