Russian Missile Strikes Mark New Chapter in Ukraine War
2022.10.10 12:15
Russian Missile Strikes Mark New Chapter in Ukraine War
Budrigannews.com – Russia unleashed a wave of missile attacks against cities all across Ukraine on Monday, explicitly targeting power plants and water supply facilities in retaliation for what President Vladimir Putin called ‘a terrorist attack’ against the bridge linking mainland Russia with Crimea at the weekend.
The attacks marked a radical departure – and escalation – from those that have characterized Russian tactics so far during the eight-month war, in so far as Putin made no attempt to disguise their intent to disrupt civilian life in the country.
“Let there be no doubt,” Putin said in televised comments addressed to his Security Council, “if attempts at terrorist attacks continue, the response from Russia will be severe.”
Several cities were forced to cut power supplies after the Russian strikes targeted generation and transmission infrastructure across 14 of Ukraine’s regions. The Defense Ministry said it had “achieved” all of its targets.
Ukrainian authorities said they had tracked over 80 missiles and shot down over half of them. The news agency Unian said at least 11 people had been killed, with another 64 injured.
The strikes were the first action of the new supreme commander of Russia’s ‘special military operation, General Sergey Surovikin, who was appointed by Putin at the weekend. As such, they prompted fears of a change of approach and more open attacks on the civilian population in the weeks and months to come.
“Putin is desperate because of battlefield defeats and uses missile terror to try to change the pace of war in his favor,” Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on social media.
Surovikin had commanded Russia’s forces in Syria from 2017, where they helped President Bashar al-Assad to regain control of the Idlib province with air and missile bombardments of civilian areas that were condemned at the time by western governments.
Monday’s attacks drew an immediate response from Ukraine’s backers in the West, with Germany – which has been criticized for withholding equipment such as front-line tanks that Ukraine has asked for – saying it would ship the first of four IRIS-T air defense systems to the country “within days.”
“The renewed rocket fire on Kyiv and the many other cities makes it clear how important it is to deliver air defense systems to Ukraine quickly,” German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said in a statement. “Russia’s missile and drone attacks primarily terrorize the civilian population. That is why we are now supporting them in particular with anti-aircraft weapons.”
The spokesman of U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss was quoted as saying that leaders of the G-7 will hold talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday to discuss their next steps.
Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think-tank, tweeted that “As horrible as today was for Ukraine today, the sliver of good news here is that Russia likely can’t sustain this rate of missile launches.
“It’s very telling that they have not had this rate of long range fires since the start of the war,” Alperovitch said.
