Russia kills civilians in first huge missile wave for weeks

Reuters:

KYIV/ZOLOCHIV, Ukraine, March 9 – Russia launched a huge wave of missile strikes across Ukraine while people slept on Thursday, killing at least six civilians, knocking out electricity and forcing a nuclear power plant off the grid.

The first big volley of missile strikes since mid-February shattered the longest calm since Moscow began a campaign to attack Ukraine’s civil infrastructure five months ago.

Kyiv said it included an unprecedented six of Russia’s small arsenal of kinzhal hypersonic cruise missiles, one of Moscow’s most valuable weapons.

“The occupiers can only terrorise civilians. That’s all they can do. But it won’t help them. They won’t avoid responsibility for everything they have done,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a statement, describing strikes that hit infrastructure and residential buildings in ten regions.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had carried out a “massive retaliatory strike” on Ukrainian infrastructure as payback for a cross-border raid last week on a village in Russia’s Bryansk region.