Russia has struck cities across Ukraine during rush hour, killing civilians and destroying infrastructure in apparent revenge after President Vladimir Putin declared an explosion on the bridge to Crimea to be a terrorist attack.
Cruise missiles tore into busy intersections, parks and tourist sites in the centre of downtown Kyiv on Monday morning with an intensity unseen even when Russian forces attempted to capture the capital early in the war.
Explosions were also reported in Lviv, Ternopil and Zhytomyr in Ukraine’s west, Dnipro and Kremenchuk in central Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia in the south and Kharkiv in the east.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the rush hour attacks appeared to have been deliberately timed to kill people.
In Kyiv, the body of a man in jeans lay in a street at a major intersection, surrounded by flaming cars. In a park, a soldier cut through the clothes of a woman who lay in the grass to try to treat her wounds. Two other women were bleeding nearby.
A huge crater gaped next to a children’s playground in a central Kyiv park. The remains of an apparent missile were buried, smoking in the mud.
More volleys of missiles struck the capital again later in the morning. Pedestrians huddled for shelter at the entrance of Metro stations and inside parking garages.
By mid-morning, Ukraine’s defence ministry said Russia had fired 75 cruise missiles, and Ukraine’s air defences had shot down 41 of them. Kyiv city police said at least five people had been killed and 12 wounded in the capital.
Security camera footage posted online showed a cloud of shrapnel and flame engulfing a glass-bottomed footbridge across parkland in the city centre, one of Kyiv’s most popular tourist sites. The bridge appeared to have been empty at the time.
“They are trying to destroy us and wipe us off the face of the earth,” Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app.
“The air raid sirens do not subside throughout Ukraine. There are missiles hitting. Unfortunately, there are dead and wounded.”
He later said the strikes had two main targets: energy infrastructure, and people.
“Such a time and such targets were specially chosen to cause as much damage as possible.”
There was no immediate word from Moscow on what it was targeting. Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians.
At one of Kyiv’s busiest road junctions, a massive crater had been blown in the intersection. Buildings were damaged and two cars and a van near the crater were completely wrecked, blacked and pitted from shrapnel.
Windows had been blown out of buildings at Kyiv’s main Taras Shevchenko University. National Guard troops in full combat gear and carrying assault rifles were lined up outside an education union building.
The strikes came two days after an explosion damaged the only bridge over the Kerch Strait to the Crimea peninsula, which Putin on Sunday called “an act of terrorism aimed at destroying critically important civilian infrastructure”.
“This was devised, carried out and ordered by the Ukrainian special services,” he said in a video on the Kremlin’s Telegram channel.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the blast on the bridge but has celebrated it. Senior Russian officials demanded a swift response from the Kremlin ahead of a meeting of Putin’s security council on Monday.
The bridge, which Putin personally opened, is a major supply route for Russian forces in southern Ukraine and a symbol of Russia’s control of Crimea, the peninsula it proclaimed annexed after its troops seized it in 2014.
Russia has faced major setbacks on the battlefield since the start of September, with Ukrainian forces bursting through the front lines and recapturing territory in the northeast and the south.
Putin responded to the losses by ordering a mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of reservists, proclaiming the annexation of occupied territory and threatening repeatedly to use nuclear weapons.
By Max Hunder and Jonathan Landay in KYIV
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