kyiv woke up to a roar of sirens and explosions. The anti-aircraft alarms, which twice warned of the launch of drones, warned at around 6:30 in the morning (one hour less in mainland Spain) that a missile attack was imminent, after the takeoff of the MIG-31K. Several loud explosions corroborated the alarm. The inhabitants, who already tend to ignore them, this time did go down to the shelters. At around 7:45 a.m., when the anti-aircraft alerts were deactivated, emergency vehicles began to travel through the city.
“It is likely that the enemy used ballistic missiles. As a result of this attack, debris fell in three districts of the city,” the City Council stated on its official Telegram account. The War Monitor channel, which reports up-to-the-minute attacks in the country, stated that “five Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missiles from the Bryansk region of the Russian Federation and two Kh-47m2 aeroballistic missiles from the complex were used. Kinzhal”, but the information has not yet been confirmed by official sources.
Authorities are assessing the damage, and have preliminarily reported at least two injuries and one death. In the Holosiivskii district, an office building, road asphalt and a gas pipeline were damaged, and five cars were set on fire. Two buildings have also been hit in the Dniprovskii and Solomianskii districts.
One of the explosions occurred on Velyka Vasylkivska Street, in the Holosiivskii district, on the top floors of an office building in the center of kyiv, in front of the St. Nicholas Cathedral. The shock wave has burst windows at a distance of up to 200 meters and has littered the sidewalks with broken glass. Firefighters work to extinguish the fire. Traffic on that commercial artery, four lanes normally packed, is practically gone.
“We don’t remember an attack like this since the fall of 2022,” said Yulia, a receptionist at a nearby hotel, when the alert had ended and she was recovering from the shock.
The attack comes just a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a missile “duel” with the United States that would demonstrate how Russia’s new Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile could defeat any American missile defense system.
“Let them choose any facility for us to attack, say, in kyiv. Let them concentrate all their anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems there. And we will attack with (a missile) Oreshnik. And we’ll see what happens. We are prepared for that experiment,” Putin said Thursday during his annual press conference.
