The Ukrainian capital, Kiev, was targeted overnight by the largest Russian drone attack since the start of the country’s invasion in February 2022, knocking out power to dozens of apartment buildings and other buildings. .
This bombing comes on the day of commemoration in Ukraine of the Holodomor, the great famine of the 1930s, during the Soviet era, a “genocide” orchestrated according to Kiev by Joseph Stalin and which caused the death of millions of Ukrainians.
On Saturday morning, the Ukrainian Air Force claimed to have shot down 71 Iranian-made Shahed attack drones launched overnight by Russia. “Most of them were destroyed in the kyiv region,” she said.
Five people, including an 11-year-old child, were injured during this strike, local authorities in Kiev said, assuring that it was the “most massive attack since the start of the invasion” of Ukraine.
The air alert in the capital lasted six hours and falling debris from drones caused fires and damaged buildings, added Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko. “The enemy continues to sow terror,” he lamented.
The attack also caused large-scale power outages in the capital after “an electricity supply line” was broken, according to Ukraine’s Energy Ministry, as temperatures fell below freezing.
“As a result, 77 residential buildings and 120 buildings in the central part of the city are without electricity,” detailed the ministry, ensuring that repair work was underway.
While ensuring that Kiev was the “main target” of the attack, the Ukrainian army claimed to have also intervened in the south of the country and that a Russian missile had been destroyed above the Dnipropetrovsk region (center) . Power outages are also affecting this region, according to authorities.
As winter approaches, Kiev is preparing for a new campaign of massive Russian bombings targeting its energy infrastructure and fears a situation similar to that of winter 2022, when millions of people were deprived of power during the wave cold.
On the front, after 21 months of war, the fighting is concentrated in the East and the South and now around the stronghold of Avdiïvka, which Moscow’s forces are trying to encircle.
“Symbolic” choice
According to the Ukrainian authorities, Moscow made the “symbolic” choice to launch this vast strike on Saturday, at a time when Ukraine commemorates the Holodomor, the famine which decimated the Ukrainian countryside 90 years ago.
“More than 70 [drones] Shahed during the night of the Holodomor commemoration […]. Russian leaders are proud of their ability to kill,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially reacted.
In a press release, the head of state then judged it “impossible to forget, understand and above all forgive the horrible crimes of genocide that Ukrainians endured in the 20th century.e century” during the Holodomor.
“They tried to subdue us, to kill us, to exterminate us,” he also said. “They failed.”
Mr. Zelensky also thanked the countries which officially recognized this famine as a “deliberate crime” of genocide.
In mid-October, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe described this famine as genocide, following in the footsteps of the European Parliament a year earlier.
Ukraine lost four to eight million inhabitants in the great famine of 1932-1933, against a backdrop of land collectivization, orchestrated according to historians by Stalin to repress any nationalist and independence desires in this country, then a Soviet republic.
Russia, for its part, categorically refuses the classification of genocide, citing the fact that the great famine of the 1930s had not only caused Ukrainian victims, but also Russians, Kazakhs and other peoples.
“In the last century, famine came from Moscow. Now we hear words of denial coming from there. And each of these words of denial sounds like a confession,” the Ukrainian president said.