Russian missile, drone strikes on Ukraine kill three

(LONDON) — Russian missiles and drones again crisscrossed Ukrainian skies on Monday night in a strike that killed at least three people.

Ukraine’s air force said on Telegram that Russia fired three Iskander ballistic missiles from occupied Crimea, one Kh-59/69 air-launched missile from Russia’s western Kursk region and 35 Iranian-made Shahed attack drones from two areas in Kursk and Crimea.

Ukrainian air defenses downed 27 drones, the air force said, with six more “lost.”

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that two people — a 38-year-old woman and her 8-year-old son — were killed in a strike on a hotel complex in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia.

Two other members of the family — the father and a 13-year-old girl — were buried under rubble but later recovered. Both are in a “serious condition” and have been hospitalized, the ministry said.

Further north, in the city of Dnipro, one person was killed and at least six injured by a Russian missile attack, the Interior Ministry wrote on Telegram.

Air raid sirens also sounded in the central city of Poltava early on Tuesday.

Vladimir Rogov — the chairman of the We Are Together with Russia movement, which cooperates with Moscow’s occupation of southern Ukraine — said on his Telegram channel that Russia’s strikes had targeted a military communications school in Poltava.

Ukraine’s air defense units were active overnight in Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Poltava and the Chernihiv and Sumy regions, the air force said.

Russia’s intensifying long-range attacks on Ukrainian military, infrastructure and civilian targets have prompted Kyiv to push its Western partners — chief among them the U.S. — for permission to use Western weapons against airfields and launch sites within Russian borders.

Ukraine has scored notable successes within Russia with its own domestically produced drones and missiles, but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly said Kyiv needs more advanced capabilities.

“The terrorist state must feel what war is,” the president said on Sunday. “To force Russia into peace, to move them from deceitful rhetoric about negotiations to taking steps to end the war, to clear our land of occupation and occupiers, we need effective tools.”

Following a deadly Russian guided bomb strike on the city of Kharkiv last week, Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address that such attacks can only be stopped “by striking Russian military airfields, their bases, and the logistics of Russian terror.”

“We talk about this every day with our partners,” he said. “We persuade. We present arguments.” 

Curtailing Russia’s ability to strike from the air, Zelenskyy added, would be “a strong step to force Russia to seek an end to the war and a just peace.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.