Russia’s military conducted a wave of attacks across Ukraine on Monday, targeting critical infrastructure facilities.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shymal revealed there had been reports of missile and drone strikes on 18 targets in 10 regions, demonstrating the most significant and widespread missile campaign since a barrage roughly two weeks ago, according to the Washington Post.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram that roughly 80% of residents within the city were left without water, with many also losing electricity, while regional Police Chief Andriy Nebytov said on the platform that the Ukrainian military shot down “at least 10 enemy missiles.”
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Russia claims to strike only military targets, but the strikes on Ukraine’s electrical system have destroyed 30% of Ukraine’s electric power stations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said weeks ago.
“There will be emergency power cuts due to large-scale strikes on critical infrastructure,” Deputy Chief of the Ukrainian Presidential Office Kyrylo Tymoshenko wrote on Telegram, while Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs, tweeted, “Another batch of Russian missiles hits Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. Instead of fighting on the battlefield, Russia fights civilians. Don’t justify these attacks by calling them a ‘response’. Russia does this because it still has the missiles and the will to kill Ukrainians.”
Monday’s barrage came in response to an incident this weekend in which Ukrainian drones swarmed Russian warships in the port of Sevastopol, which is in Russian-occupied Crimea. The Russian Foreign Ministry labeled the strike a “terrorist attack” and accused “British specialists” of facilitating the attack “under the cover of the humanitarian corridor set up for the implementation of the Black Sea Grain Initiative,” from which Russia then withdrew.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken “urge[d] all parties to keep this essential, life-saving Initiative function” in a statement on Saturday evening, noting that the Black Sea Grain Initiative had already moved more than 9 million metric tons of food around the world.
“Any act by Russia to disrupt these critical grain exports is essentially a statement that people and families around the world should pay more for food or go hungry,” he added. “In suspending this arrangement, Russia is again weaponizing food in the war it started, directly impacting low- and middle-income countries and global food prices, and exacerbating already dire humanitarian crises and food insecurity.”
Russia has frequently launched missile and drone campaigns, which include Iranian assistance, while they have lost ground in Ukraine despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to call up 300,000 reservists last month.
The Russian military has deployed “several thousand” of the newly mobilized reserve forces since the middle of October, and they’re largely “poorly equipped,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in its Monday update. Those reserve troops were likely given older rifles called AKMs, which were first introduced in the late 1950s and “are likely in barely usable condition following poor storage.”
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Over recent weeks, Western leaders have issued stark warnings to Russia, which has teased the possibility of using a low-grade nuclear weapon in Ukraine. President Joe Biden has said that if Putin were to do that, it could lead to “Armageddon.”
Putin will “most likely” continue conventional military operations into the new year to gain new ground and is “unlikely to escalate to the use of tactical nuclear weapons barring the sudden collapse of the Russian military permitting Ukrainian forces to make unrolled advances throughout the theater,” the Institute for the Study of War said in its Sunday update.
