Russia launched a missile attack on Ukraine Thursday in its first major retaliation for Ukraine’s attack earlier in the week on a military facility in the Russian region of Bryansk. The attack saw the Ukrainians use an American-made and supplied long-range missile called ATACMS, which President Biden had given Ukrainian forces a chance to fire deeper into Russian territory just two days earlier.
Moscow has been warning the US and its NATO allies for months not to give Ukraine permission to fire Western missiles at Russia, and Mr. Biden’s weekend decision to allow such attacks attract real new dangers from members of parliament and Russian media close to President Vladimir Putin that the US was escalating in conflict for almost three years at the risk of causing a new world war.
The US and its allies have argued that Putin is escalating the war that began by ordering a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, including by deploying more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers to bolster his own forces in recent weeks. But there is no doubt that Moscow will respond to the first American use of ATACMS to strike in Russia, and airstrikes. sirens blared across the country Wednesday while the US closed its embassy in Kyiv and warned of the possibility of “significant airstrikes” to come.
The attack did not happen on Wednesday, but overnight, with Russian missiles targeting several cities, but the hardest hit was the Dnipro in the central east. The Ukrainian Air Force claimed that the Russian attack on the city was the first use of an intercontinental ballistic missile in an intercontinental ballistic missile war, although Western officials told CBS News on Thursday that an ICBM was not used in the attack.
State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk Region / Anadolu / Getty
Two U.S. officials also told CBS News that Russia had fired a ballistic missile, not an ICBM, on Thursday, with one saying an intermediate-range ballistic missile was fired from east of Volgograd, Russia, at the Dnipro target. If accurate, that would be a flight path of about 500 miles.
Despite denials from US officials, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on social media that “all characteristics” of the Russian missile used in the attack on Dnipro “matched an intercontinental ballistic missile,” although he said an investigation was underway. to confirm exactly what has been burning in the city.
Zelenskyy accused his “crazy neighbor” Russia of using his country “as a testing ground” for new weapons.
During a live televised news conference in Moscow on Thursday, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, received a call and a person known only as “Masha” could be heard asking her not to comment on the “ballistic missile attack carried out by the West”. started talking about” in Dnipro.
Ukraine’s air force did not say what the Russian ICBM targeted or what caused the damage, but the regional governor of Dnipro, Serhiy Lysak, said the strike damaged an industrial plant and caused a fire in the city, killing 15 people.
The Ukrainian Air Force said the Russian strike also included Kinzhal hypersonic missiles and seven cruise missiles – in all weapons are used multiple times before by Russia during the war. Six Russian missiles were shot down, the air force said.
The strike came hours after a CBS News team in Kyiv, along with hundreds of thousands of residents of the Ukrainian capital, were forced to find underground parking spaces, metro stations and basements on Wednesday when air raid alarms sounded.
In the end, none of the missiles landed on Wednesday, leaving Ukraine to accuse Russia of a psychological attack.
“We are very worried,” a young Kyiv resident told CBS News. “We want to protect our country. We want to live in peace.”
After more than two and a half years of war in Ukraine, the scars and anxieties run deep.
“This can happen any minute, any hour,” Major Taras Berezovets, of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense forces, told CBS News, arguing that Russia and Putin are blackmailing their country, trying to scare Ukrainians into surrender – “trying to draw the conclusion that something .that kind of opposition to the Russian invasion is pointless.”
Some believe that Russia and Ukraine are trying to maximize their gains — and with them, their leverage over future ceasefire talks — before President-elect Donald Trump returns to office in January.
There are significant fears in Ukraine and in European capitals that Trump could reduce US support for Kyiv, forcing the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept a ceasefire negotiated with Russia that would see Ukraine hand over land controlled by Putin’s forces.
Eleanor Watson and
contributed to this report.
Holly Williams
