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A new round of missile attacks struck the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia Tuesday, as the death toll from the previous day’s widespread Russian missile barrage across Ukraine rose to 19.
Missiles struck a school, a medical facility and residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia, city council secretary Anatoliy Kurtev said. The State Emergency Service said 12 S-300 missiles slammed into public facilities, setting off a large fire in the area. One person was killed.
The S-300 was originally designed as a long-range surface-to-air missile. Russia has increasingly resorted to using repurposed versions of the weapon to strike targets on the ground.
The morning’s air raid warnings extended throughout the country, sending some residents back into shelters after months of relative calm in the capital and many other cities. That earlier lull had led many Ukrainians to ignore the regular sirens, but Monday’s attacks gave them new urgency.
Beside the usual sirens, residents in the capital, Kyiv, were jolted early Tuesday by a new type of loud alarm that blared automatically from mobile phones. The caustic-sounding alert was accompanied by a text warning of the possibility of missile strikes.
The state emergencies service said 19 people died and 105 people were wounded in Monday’s missile strikes that targeted critical infrastructure facilities in Kyiv and 12 other regions. More than 300 cities and towns were without power, from the Ukrainian capital all the way to Lviv on the border with Poland. Many of the attacks occurred far from the war’s front lines.
With Ukrainian forces growing increasingly bold following a series of battlefield successes, a cornered Kremlin is ratcheting up Cold War-era rhetoric and fanning concerns it could broaden the war and suck in more combatants.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, warned Tuesday that Western military assistance to Kyiv including training Ukrainian soldiers in NATO countries and feeding Ukraine real-time satellite data to target Russian forces has “increasingly drawn Western nations into the conflict on the part of the Kyiv regime.
