Roughly 100 Russian Missiles Fired Against Ukraine: Live War Updates

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KYIV, Ukraine — Russia fired roughly 100 missiles at targets across Ukraine on Tuesday, one of the broadest aerial attacks since the invasion began, causing blasts in at least six regions including Kyiv, the capital, just days after Moscow retreated from a key city in the south.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a video posted on Telegram that most of the strikes targeted the country’s energy systems. Fifteen pieces of energy infrastructure were damaged, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a senior official in the president’s office.

Officials in communities across the country reported power outages, and at least one person was killed in the capital, Kyiv, the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, wrote on Telegram. Witnesses said a fragment from a missile shot down by air defense had struck the person’s building.

The attacks — the largest coordinated strikes on the energy system since the star of the war, according to Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Halushchenko — also caused explosions in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, the western city of Lviv and other cities, officials said on Telegram. Air raid sirens also sounded in the southern city of Mykolaiv.

Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, said roughly 100 missiles had been fired, a salvo that surpassed the 84 rockets that Russia launched on Oct. 10, the first day of an assault on Ukrainian infrastructure that went on for weeks.

But Ukraine’s air defense systems appeared to have knocked out a substantial number of the missiles, as in other recent attacks. Seventy of the missiles fired by Russia on Tuesday had been shot down, the country’s air force wrote on Twitter.

The fresh attacks followed one of Ukraine’s most triumphant moments of the war: the recapture of Kherson, a strategically important city in southern Ukraine. After Russian forces withdrew last week, Mr. Zelensky made an unannounced visit to the city, telling residents that the moment signaled “the beginning of the end of the war.”

The loss of Kherson — the only provincial capital that Moscow had seized since it invaded the country in February — was a stinging blow for Russia, and prompted criticism of the Kremlin’s strategy by some of the country’s pro-war commentators.

With Ukraine steadily building momentum on the battlefield in recent months, including with an offensive in the northeast that recaptured broad swaths of territory in September, Ukrainian and Western officials have warned that Russia would step up its efforts to break Ukraine’s resolve and increasing sense of confidence.

Much of Russia’s focus has been on Ukraine’s ability to provide power to its residents as winter looms. Russian forces have been targeting Ukrainian infrastructure for weeks, assaults that have frequently knocked out electrical service and forced repair crews to race to keep up.

On Tuesday, local officials reported outages in several parts of the country. The mayor of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, said that city workers were trying to restore power after the attack, while Serhiy Gamalii of the military administration in Khmelnytskyi said electrical service had been knocked out there, too.

The effects of the strikes even crossed Ukraine’s borders. Parts of Moldova, which is closely linked to Ukraine’s power grid, also lost service, but many localities were soon reconnected, according to a Moldovan deputy interior minister.

The Ukrainian Air Force warned this week that Moscow was stockpiling missiles to renew its assaults, which has been battering energy infrastructure since last month. Russian forces launched a devastating series of attacks on Oct. 10, including with drones, that targeted more than 10 cities, including Kyiv. That followed an explosion at the bridge linking the Crimean Peninsula and Russia that Moscow blamed on Ukraine.

Since then, Russia has frequently attacked Ukraine’s energy systems.

Tuesday’s strikes came the same day that Mr. Zelensky addressed world leaders gathered in Bali for a meeting of the Group of 20 nations. Andriy Yermak, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said the timing was not a coincidence.

“Does anyone seriously think that the Kremlin really wants peace?” he wrote on Twitter. “It wants obedience. But at the end of the day, terrorists always lose.”

Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Monika Pronczuk contributed reporting.