Russia launched a barrage of missiles at Ukraine on Thursday in the first major retaliation for Ukraine’s attack earlier this week on a military facility in Russia’s Bryansk region. In that attack, the Ukrainians used American-made and supplied long-range missiles known as ATACMS, which President Biden had authorized Ukrainian forces to fire deeper into Russian territory just two days earlier.
Moscow had warned the US and its NATO allies for months against allowing Ukraine to fire Western missiles at Russia. Biden’s weekend decision to allow such strikes drew sharp new warnings from lawmakers and Russian media close to President Vladimir Putin that the US was escalating the situation almost three years of conflict with the risk of starting a new world war.
The US and its allies have argued that Putin has escalated the war he started by ordering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, including by deploying more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers in recent weeks to strengthen its own armed forces. But there was little doubt that Moscow would respond to the Ukrainians’ first use of the US ATACMS to invade Russia in some way, and to airstrikes. Sirens sounded across the country on Wednesday when the US closed its embassy in Kiev and warned of a possible impending ‘significant airstrike’.
The attack did not take place on Wednesday, but rather overnight, with Russian missiles targeting several cities but hitting central-eastern Dnipro the hardest. Ukraine’s air force claimed that Russia’s attack on the city included the war’s first use of an intercontinental ballistic missile, although a Western official told CBS News on Thursday that no ICBM was used in the attack.
The official said Russia used at least one ballistic missile but no ICBM in the attack on Thursday morning.
State Emergency Service of Ukraine in the Dnipropetrovsk/Anadolu/Getty region
During a news conference broadcast live to television in Moscow on Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova received a phone call and a man identified only as “Masha” could be heard ordering her not to comment on the ‘ballistic missile attack carried out by the Westerners’. started talking about” in Dnipro.
The Ukrainian Air Force did not say what the suspected Russian ICBM targeted or whether it caused any damage, but Dnipro regional governor Serhiy Lysak said the attack damaged an industrial enterprise and caused fires in the city, injuring 15 people hit.
The Ukrainian Air Force said the Russian attack also included a Kinzhal hypersonic missile and seven cruise missiles – all of them weapons that have been used many times previously by Russia during the war. Six of the Russian missiles were shot down, the air force said.
The strike came hours after the CBS News team in Kiev, along with hundreds of thousands of residents of the Ukrainian capital, were forced to take cover in underground parking garages, subway stations and basements on Wednesday when air raid sirens sounded.
Ultimately, no missiles landed on Wednesday, allowing Ukraine to accuse Russia of a psychological attack.
“We are very concerned,” a young Kiev resident told CBS News. “We want to keep our country. We want to live in peace.”
After more than two and a half years of war in Ukraine, the scars and fear are deep.
“It could happen at any time, at any hour,” Major Taras Berezovets of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Force told CBS News, arguing that Russia and Putin are blackmailing his country, trying to scare Ukrainians into surrendering – “ in an attempt to conclude that kind of resistance to the Russian invasion is absolutely futile.”
Some believe that both Russia and Ukraine are trying to maximize their gains — and thus their influence on any future ceasefire negotiations — before newly elected President Donald Trump returns to power in January.
There are deep fears in Ukraine and European capitals that Trump could cut U.S. support to Kiev, forcing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government to accept a negotiated ceasefire with Russia that would require Ukraine to give up land occupied by the Putin’s troops.
Holly Williams
