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Russia threatened to target “decision-making centres” in Kyiv with a powerful experimental ballistic missile after launching a massive rocket and drone attack on 14 regions of Ukraine that plunged more than a million people into emergency blackouts.
Ukraine said its air defences intercepted 79 of 91 missiles and 35 of 97 explosive drones launched by Russia in the early hours of Thursday, and that another 62 drones were lost from radar screens, suggesting they were downed by electronic jamming.
It was the 11th major attack on Ukraine’s power infrastructure this year and the second this month, further weakening an energy grid that has lost more than 60 per cent of its generating capacity to such strikes since Russia launched an all-out invasion of its pro-western neighbour in February 2022.
“Several regions reported [cruise] missile strikes with cluster munitions, deliberately aimed at civilian infrastructure,” said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “The use of these cluster elements significantly complicates the work of our rescuers and power engineers in mitigating the damage, marking yet another vile escalation in Russia’s terrorist tactics.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin described Thursday’s bombardment as a response to Ukraine’s use of US-supplied Atacms missiles twice in recent days to strike targets in the Kursk region of Russia, where Kyiv’s troops hold a swathe of territory.
Those attacks, on a Russian airfield and a powerful air defence system, came after Russia hit the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine last week with what Mr Putin said was a new intermediate-range ballistic missile called “Oreshnik”.
“Of course, we will respond to the ongoing strikes on Russian territory with long-range western-made missiles … including by possibly continuing to test the Oreshnik in combat conditions, as was done on November 21st,” he told leaders of several ex-Soviet states at a security summit in Kazakhstan.
“At present, the ministry of defence and the general staff are selecting targets to hit on Ukrainian territory. These could be military facilities, defence and industrial enterprises, or decision-making centres in Kyiv.”
When asked by a Russian journalist to elaborate on his threat to strike Kyiv, Mr Putin said: “There was a joke in the Soviet times about the weather forecast: the forecast went like this – today, during the course of day, everything is possible.”
The veteran autocrat, who has ruled Russia for 24 years, reiterated claims that no western air defence system could stop Oreshnik, which reportedly can reach speeds of Mach 11 (more than 13,000km/h) and can carry six warheads, each with six submunitions.
He said the power of a “group strike” of the missiles with conventional warheads would resemble that of a nuclear weapon: “Everything at the epicentre of the blast … essentially turns to dust.”
Mr Putin also claimed that Russia’s missile output is now “10 times greater than the production of all Nato countries combined. And next year this production will increase by another 25-30 per cent”.
Russia has put much of its economy on a war footing but western analysts remain sceptical of Mr Putin’s claims about its weapons. Before his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he boasted that the Kinzhal and Zircon missiles in Moscow’s arsenal were unstoppable, but they have been shot down several times near Kyiv by US-supplied Patriot air defence systems that are decades old.
Immense military spending and mounting western sanctions are also putting pressure on Russia’s economy: the rouble hit its lowest rate against the US dollar since early 2022 this week, and a central bank base interest rate of 21 per cent has failed to stop inflation rising to 8.5 per cent.
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