Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine continued to come under heavy bombardment on New Year’s Day as Russia unleashed a fresh wave of attacks in the early hours.
Air raid sirens wailed for hours and explosions filled the sky around Kyiv overnight as 2023 began and the war entered its 11th month. The renewed assault began the year as Putin’s forces ended it, with attacks branded “cowardly” by the US.
Ukraine’s Air Force command said it had destroyed 45 Iranian-made Shahed drones – 32 of them after midnight on Sunday and 13 late on Saturday.
The Kremlin’s assault on Sunday came following a defiant and combative New Year’s Eve message by Vladimir Putin.
The Russian president used his address to accuse the West of using Ukraine to “destroy” his country as he attempted to rally public support for what continues to insist is a “special military operation”.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, lashed out at Moscow’s renewed bombing campaign in his message to the nation.
“They call themselves Christians … but they are for the devil,” the Ukraine president said of the Kremlin’s supporters. “They are for him and with him.”
Across Ukraine, curfews ranging from 7pm. to midnight remained in place, making celebrations for the start of 2023 impossible in many public spaces.
Fragments from destroyed missiles caused minimal damage in the capital’s centre, and preliminarily reports indicated there were no wounded or casualties, Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said on social media.
Ukraine’s top command said in a report on Sunday that Russia had launched 31 missile and 12 air strikes across the country in the previous 24 hours.
US ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink said on Twitter: “Russia coldly and cowardly attacked Ukraine in the early hours of the new year. But Putin still does not seem to understand that Ukrainians are made of iron.”
Andrii Nebytov, chief of Kyiv’s police, posted a photo on his Telegram messaging app, allegedly of a piece of drone used in the attack on the capital with a hand-written sign on it in Russian saying “Happy New Year”.
“These wreckage are not at the front, where fierce battles are taking place, they are here, on a sports grounds, where children play,” Mr Nebytov said.
Attacks on Saturday killed at least one person in Kyiv and injured a dozen. They followed many bombardments over the past months, which Russia has chiefly directed at Ukraine’s energy and water infrastructure.
The newest attacks had damaged infrastructure in Sumy, in the northeast of the country, Khmelnytskyi in the west and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in south east and south, the general staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said.
A glow from explosion is seen over the Kyiv’s skyline during a Russian drones strike on January 1
“Let the day be quiet,” Valentyn Reznichenko, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region said early on Sunday, after reporting heavy shelling of several communities in the region overnight, that wounded one.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the southern Russian region of Belgorod bordering Ukraine, said that overnight shelling of the outskirts of Shebekino town had damaged houses but there were no casualties.
Russian media also reported multiple Ukrainian attacks on the Moscow-controlled parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with local officials saying that at least nine people were wounded.
Russia’s RIA state news agency reported that six people were killed when a hospital in Donetsk was attacked on Saturday.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a statement that at least one person had been killed and another eight wounded in multiple afternoon explosions on Saturday
There was little respite for Ukrainian soldiers on the front line, here preparing in Donetsk on December 31
