What happened?
In the months since Russian strikes on Kyiv at the start of the invasion of Ukraine, the capital city has returned to some semblance of normality. On Monday, that atmosphere was shattered.
“When I was here in the summer, it felt like an ordinary city,” said Peter Beaumont. “And, up until now, on this trip, as well. When you go to a park, there are people doing yoga or running; restaurants are open, people are going to work. It doesn’t feel like that today.”
The first air-raid alert in Kyiv on Monday lasted almost six hours, from 6.47am local time until 12.25pm. Fourteen other cities and areas across the country, many of them far from the frontlines and without significant military infrastructure, were also hit – you can see them mapped here. There were explosions in Lviv and Ternopil in the east, Dnipro, seen as a safe haven for refugees, and, for the third night in a row, the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, which came under attack again last night.
The Ukrainian ministry of defence said Russia fired 83 missiles during the onslaught, of which 43 were intercepted. The latest toll is 19 dead, with 60 injured, figures that are likely to rise.
Where did the missiles hit?
Russian state media focused on the damage to “critical infrastructure facilities”, and Ukraine’s prime minister Denys Shmyhal confirmed that 11 such facilities in eight regions as well as Kyiv had been hit. The mayor of Kharkiv said the city was “completely without power”, and more than 1,300 settlements across the country were cut off, the state emergency services said last night. This morning, there are reports of 98 miners stuck underground in the town of Kryvyi Rih because of power outages.
That infrastructure – power stations, water systems and transport facilities – is crucial to Ukraine’s civilian population rather than its military. While such operations are widely viewed as unjustifiable under international law, they do “have a raw strategic value in a country that has such harsh winters”, Peter said. “People are already really worried about what the next few months are going to be like.”
Even so, the most shocking feature of Monday’s attack was the apparent selection of civilian targets – at rush hour – with no conceivable value beyond retribution.
A bridge popular with tourists on the Dnieper River was hit. Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko said that at least two museums and the National Philharmonic building were damaged. And a missile exploded in Taras Shevchenko Park, often used by families and children, leaving a crater right next to a playground. A widely shared video showed a student recording herself as she headed to class at nearby Taras Shevchenko university and cowering as a missile hit close by.
Western leaders called the attacks war crimes. “There doesn’t seem to be any attempt to justify missiles hitting what are clearly civilian targets,” Peter said. “All of this is framed as a response to an attack on the Kerch bridge between Russia and Crimea – but that is a main military supply line. Hitting a tourist bridge in response to that seems like some form of trolling with a missile.”
What was the response in Russia?
In televised remarks, Vladimir Putin said that the attacks were a necessary reaction to the Kerch bridge attack. “To leave such acts without a response is simply impossible,” he said.
Andrew Roth, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, said it was “transparent” that the “main audience for [the] strikes are nationalist critics at home”. After weeks of setbacks, Russia’s hawks have demanded a harsher response – and their comments on Monday suggested that Putin had succeeded in appeasing them. Andrew and Pjotr Sauer explain that crucial context here.
Hardliners were also satisfied by the installation of Sergei Surovikin, a notoriously cruel military leader with the nickname “General Armageddon” who was central to Russia’s role in the Syrian conflict, as overall commander of the Kremlin’s forces in Ukraine. A former defence ministry official told Pjotr Sauer for this profile: “Surovikin is absolutely ruthless, with little regard for human life. I am afraid his hands will be completely covered in Ukrainian blood.”
How did Ukraine react?
After the attacks abated, Peter headed out from his hotel to report from Shevchenko Park. Tetiana Kononir, 58, who was watching the cleanup operation, told him: “This only unites us even more. [Putin] will never defeat us. He will never put us on our knees.”
There was plenty of evidence of that kind of defiance. Videos circulated on social media showing people singing Ukrainian songs as they took cover in a metro station. Peter saw a boy doing tricks on his skateboard within 200 metres of the attack, people walking their dogs, and shops and restaurants opening again.
This on-the-ground piece by Peter, Charlotte Higgins and Artem Mazhulin captures the sense that morale will not be dented by a strategy more focused on civilian targets. “People are angry,” Peter said. “They just want to get at Putin. You see people getting treated for shrapnel injuries, and they’re remarkably calm. There is a sense that with what this city has been through, it can survive anything.”
Ukrainian officials struck a similar tone, with Volodymyr Zelenskiy posting a video from the street outside his office even as the missiles struck. Others used the attacks as evidence for the urgency of their calls for greater backing from the west – particularly in terms of missile defence systems. “Protect the sky over Ukraine!” Defence minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted. “This will protect our cities and our people. This will protect the future of Europe.”
What happens next?
The vital question over the next few days, Peter said, is whether “this is a screw-you retaliatory strike or the start of something bigger and more serious”. But there are doubts over whether Russia has the stocks of missiles to maintain such an approach, as Dan Sabbagh notes in this analysis.
The chief of GCHQ will say in a rare speech today that Russian forces are exhausted and their supplies of munitions are running out. “These attacks don’t make a lot of sense for the military picture on the ground,” Peter said. “Shooting up cities doesn’t advance your troops. What I think would worry Ukraine more is some change on the frontlines.”
In that context, there may be more concern over the news yesterday that Russian forces will be allowed to return to Belarus, potentially stretching Ukrainian forces further on the northern border.
Meanwhile, as G7 leaders meet today with Volodymyr Zelenskiy in attendance, western leaders appear to have acknowledged the renewed urgency of the case for urgent additional help: Germany said it would begin to deliver four long-awaited advanced air defence systems in the next few days, while Biden also pledged the provision of advanced air defence systems in a call with Zelenskiy yesterday.
“Those systems aren’t infallible,” Peter said. “But you cannot have a conversation with anyone in this country, whether they’re a farmer in Kherson or a senior official, where they don’t come up.”
Behind all of this is an unthinkable threat: the prospect of nuclear attack. “Everybody here knows it’s a shoe that hasn’t dropped, and it overshadows life to some degree,” Peter said. “But one of the features of the last few days is that if something like what happened to the Kerch bridge doesn’t prompt that, when it was so humiliating for Putin, we may have a long way to go to get there.”
