Kyiv: In advance of Moscow's much-anticipated Victory Day holiday, which commemorates the anniversary of its defeat of Nazi Germany, the country's officials said early on Monday that Russia had launched a massive wave of strikes on Kyiv and throughout Ukraine, causing destruction and injuries.
Russian missiles set a food storage facility on fire in the Black Sea city of Odesa, and explosions were reported in a number of other Ukrainian regions, according to Ukrainian officials, who said at least five people were hurt as a result of the attacks on Kyiv.
The new attacks happen as Moscow gets ready for its Victory Day parade on Tuesday, a significant anniversary for President Vladimir Putin who has declared that Russia would defeat a Ukraine that was allegedly under the control of a new Nazi incarnation by invoking the spirit of the Soviet army that defeated Nazi German forces.
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Ukraine's top general in charge of the defence of the besieged city said that Russia increased shelling of Bakhmut in an effort to take it by Tuesday after the Wagner mercenary group of Russia appeared to abandon plans to withdraw from it.
West of the capital's core, in the Solomyanskyi and Sviatoshyn districts of Kyiv, explosions injured three people and caused two more injuries, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
While there was no fire as a result of drone debris landing on a runway at the Zhuliany airport, one of the Ukrainian capital's two passenger airports, according to the military administration of Kiev, emergency services were on the scene.
It also claimed that drone debris appeared to have damaged a two-story building in the Shevchenkivskyi district of central Kyiv. There was no recent information available regarding possible casualties.
Witnesses who spoke to Reuters claimed to have heard numerous explosions in Kyiv, where local authorities claimed that the city's air defence systems were thwarting the attacks. The number of drones that were launched towards Kiev was unclear at first.
In what he claimed was a Russian attack on a food warehouse, among other things, Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesperson for the Odesa military administration, posted images of a large structure completely engulfed in flames on his Telegram channel.
Following hours of air raid warnings over roughly two-thirds of Ukraine, media reports of explosion sounds in Kherson, Ukraine's southernmost region, and the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine's southeast, also surfaced.
Local official in Zaporizhzhia Vladimir Rogov claimed that Russian forces had attacked a warehouse and a position of Ukrainian troops in the nearby town of Orikhiv. The report could not be independently verified by Reuters.
Separately, the regional military administration claimed in a Facebook post that Russian forces shelled eight locations in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine on Sunday.
Strikes on Russian-controlled targets have also increased over the past two weeks, particularly in Crimea. Ukraine claims that destroying the enemy's infrastructure is a prelude to its long-anticipated ground assault, without confirming any involvement in those attacks.
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On February 24, 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine, claiming it was a "special military operation" to protect Russia from neo-Nazis there. Kyiv and its allies, however, claim it was merely a land grab.
Since the invasion, which resulted in the largest conflict in Europe since World War Two, thousands of people have died and millions have been displaced