Sundiata Post – Russia, on Friday, December 29, launched 122 missiles and 36 drones against Ukrainian targets, killing about 30 civilians across the country.
At least 144 people were injured and an unknown number were buried under rubble during the roughly 18-hour onslaught, Ukrainian officials said on Friday.
A maternity hospital, apartment blocks, and schools were among the buildings reported damaged across Ukraine.
In the capital, Kyiv, broken glass and mangled metal littered city streets. Air raid and emergency service sirens wailed as plumes of smoke drifted into a bright blue sky.
A 72-year-old Kyiv resident, Kateryna Ivanivna, said she threw herself to the ground when a missile struck.
“There was an explosion, then flames. I covered my head and got down in the street. Then I ran into the subway station,” she told AFP.
Meanwhile, in Poland, authorities said what apparently was a Russian missile entered the country’s airspace on Friday morning from the direction of Ukraine and then vanished off radars.
In the attack on Ukraine, the air force intercepted most of the ballistic and cruise missiles and the Shahed-type drones overnight, said Ukraine’s military chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
Western officials and analysts had recently warned that Russia limited its cruise missile strikes for months in an apparent effort to build up stockpiles for massive strikes during the winter, hoping to break the Ukrainians’ spirit.
The result was “the most massive aerial attack” since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Air Force Commander, Mykola Oleshchuk, wrote on his official Telegram channel.
It topped the previous biggest assault, in November 2022 when Russia launched 96 missiles, and this year’s biggest, with 81 missiles on March 9, according to air force records.