Russian missile barrage slams into Ukrainian cities: 6 dead

Air raid sirens wailed through the night as the attacks targeted a wide swath of the country

 

A barrage of more than 80 Russian missiles and a smaller number of exploding drones hit residential buildings and critical infrastructure across Ukraine on Thursday, killing six people and leaving hundreds of thousands without heat or electricity.

The largest such attack in three weeks also put Europe’s largest nuclear plant at risk by knocking it off the power grid for nearly half of the day before it was reconnected. Because nuclear reactors need constant power to run cooling systems to avoid a meltdown, the latest power loss at the Zaporizhzhia plant again raised the specter of a nuclear catastrophe.

Air raid sirens wailed through the night as the attacks targeted a wide swath of the country, including western Ukraine, which is far from the front lines. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the assault that came while many people slept was “another attempt by the terrorist state to wage war against civilization.”

The Russian Defense Ministry said the strikes were in retaliation for a recent incursion into the Bryansk region of western Russia by what Moscow claimed were Ukrainian saboteurs. Ukraine denied the claim and warned that Moscow could use the allegations to justify stepping up its own assaults.