A Russian army offensive with drones and missiles has caused the death of at least 13 people this Thursday in several cities in Ukraine, including the capital, Kyiv. The attack has spread to the western city of Lviv, forcing neighboring Poland to deploy fighter jets to secure its airspace after an object that Warsaw is investigating and Kyiv identifies as a Russian cruise missile penetrated Polish territory. The attacks occurred following the visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the United States, where, according to him, he spoke with U.S. President Donald Trump about licenses for Patriot missiles.
The Russian offensive forced air raid alerts to be activated in most regions of Ukraine. A witness reported hearing explosions in Kyiv. Some non-residential buildings caught fire, according to the capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, on the messaging app Telegram.
One person died and two were injured in the capital, emergency services reported. Additionally, six more people, including two children, died in the Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava regions.
In Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky’s hometown, two girls aged 5 and 12 are among the six people who died and eight were injured in what Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the city’s defense council, described as a direct hit by a Russian Iskander-M ballistic missile.
“A dark night,” Vilkul said on Telegram, adding that the missile, launched from the Russian region of Voronezh, struck the home of a large family, and warned that the death toll could rise as emergency teams clear the rubble.
Projectiles to the west
In Lviv, near Poland, rescue teams were working to clear debris to reach trapped people after Russian missiles damaged two apartment buildings and left 26 injured, authorities reported.
On Wednesday night, Zelensky had warned that he had information that a large-scale Russian attack was likely, stating that the security of Ukrainians depended on the willingness of allies to provide missile defenses. “It is important that our partners fully understand what is happening and that the protection of people’s lives depends directly on their will,” he wrote on Telegram.
The Russian Ministry of Defense reported on Thursday that its forces attacked what it called military facilities across Ukraine, in areas ranging from the capital, Kyiv, to Lviv and Dnipropetrovsk, as well as three cargo ships.
Poland, a member of the European Union and NATO, deployed fighter jets to protect its airspace amid Russian air attacks. The Operational Command of the Polish Armed Forces stated that at 03:40 it detected an unidentified object moving westward within the country’s airspace. Before it could be identified with certainty, the object disappeared from radar.
Authorities found a crater about 10 meters in diameter and scattered debris in an agricultural area cordoned off by police in Tarnawa-Kolonia, near Lublin. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk suspended part of his schedule and traveled to the region to follow the investigations. In an emergency meeting, Tusk stated that “all indications” point to the object that fell in eastern Poland being a Russian Kh-101 missile, although he specified that authorities want to have absolute certainty about the type of projectile and its origin. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha also maintained that it was a Kh-101 cruise missile launched by Russia during the massive early morning attack and emphasized that the incident constitutes a violation of NATO airspace.
Read more We’ve never seen one so small: this is the external battery that fits in any pocket
