Kyiv, Ukraine – Russia’s aerial attack on Ukraine was colossal.
Moving in waves from several directions and at different speeds and heights, 127 missiles and 109 drones attacked 15 of Ukraine’s 24 regions.
The attack is being seen in Ukraine as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revenge for Kyiv’s daring incursion into the western Russian region of Kursk that began in early August and has resulted in the apparent takeover of more than 1,000sq kilometres (386sq miles).
“He is a vindictive person, he got offended,” General Lieutenant Ihor Romanenko, ex-deputy head of the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera.
The attack began in predawn darkness on Monday as buzzing swarms of explosives-laden heavy drones took off from the Azov Sea town of Yeisk in southwestern Russia.
Then the Kinzhal (Dagger) ballistic missiles whizzed away from under the wings of MiG 31 fighter jets stationed in the western Russian town of Lipetsk.
The Kinzhals can manoeuvre in-flight and speed up to a breathtaking 4km (2.5 miles) per second – half the speed a rocket needs to reach outer space.
Heavy Tu-95 bombers in the Volgograd region launched Kh-101 missiles, the type that had hit Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital in July.
Despite their subsonic speed, Kh-101s are hard to intercept as they can fly only 50 metres (164 feet) above ground and zigzag on their way to their targets.
Ballistic Iskander missiles were shot off from the western Voronezh region and annexed Crimea.
‘This attack, it was bigger than usual’
The wail of air raid sirens woke up Anatoly Dmitruk, a railway maintenance worker, despite the wax ear plugs he shoves into his ears every night.
But he went to sleep “a couple of times” before air defence systems filled the air with deafening booms while shooting down the missiles and drones.
“I realised this attack it was bigger than usual,” Dmitruk told Al Jazeera.
He checked the Radar Ukraine Telegram channel to see the attack’s scope – and got up from his bed to sit in the corridor following the “be between two walls” rule he learned when Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.
That was when his wife and 17-year-old son Arseniy left Ukraine – first to ex-Soviet Moldova and then to the western German city of Dusseldorf.
The explosions stopped before 8am. The air raid alert rang on for another three hours.
For Dmitruk, the alert’s unprecedented duration had a silver lining.
The burly 39-year-old lives in a two-bedroom apartment in eastern Kyiv, and his only way to work is the subway that straddles the 700-metre-long (2,297-foot-long) Metro bridge above the Dnipro River and stops working during alerts.
“So, I went back to sleep and then had a lovely morning at home,” Dmitruk said.
Asked whether he was frightened, he shrugged with an indifferent “meh”. Putin, he added, has gone “cuckoo”.
Feelings of anxiety have dulled after hundreds of air raid alerts in Kyiv since 2022, a Ukrainian psychologist said.
“The anxiety ahead of new shelling is a routine emotional background for millions of Ukrainians,” Svitlana Chunikhina, vice president of the Association of Political Psychologists, a group in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
On the one hand, they adapted to the threats and made their safety practices routine hiding in a shelter, between two walls or in a subway station, she said.
But on the other hand, the stress is accumulating, becoming chronic, and its destructive consequences can manifest themselves years later, she said.
However, Moscow’s aerial attacks failed to reach its main objective of “reaching the threshold” of patience of the Ukrainian public and politicians, she said.
“It’s not happening, and that’s the main effect of massive missile attacks on Ukrainian cities,” she concluded.
‘Russia’s most massive attack’
Ukrainian air defence forces shot down 102 out of the 127 missiles and 99 out of the 109 drones, Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk said.
“It was Russia’s most massive attack,” he said.
However, the rest of the missiles and drones reached 15 of Ukraine’s 24 regions, killing seven, wounding 47 and damaging buildings, power and transmission stations emergency officials said.
Russia has habitually denied targeting civilians and said its “high-precision strike” hit Ukraine’s energy infrastructure that “supports the military-industrial complex.”
The attack hit the 288-metre-long (945-foot-long) dam that is part of the Kyiv hydropower plant just kilometres upstream from the capital.
But the damage was insignificant and the dam is “intact”, Tymofei Mylovanov, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said.
“Had the dam collapsed, a significant part of Kyiv would have been flooded,” he said.
Completed in 1968, the dam put an end to annual spring floods that reached parts of Kyiv, especially on its lower left bank.
The dam was retrofitted in 2011, but many residents of the left bank are worried.
If the dam is destroyed, the resulting flood “will sweep our house away in five minutes,” Tetyana Kravchenko, who lives in a two-storey house she and her husband completed in 2019, told Al Jazeera.
The house is only 100 metres (328 feet) from a sandy beach on the Dnipro – a luxury that turned into a disadvantage during the war, she said.
“We thought there would be peace and quiet, but instead, we feel like living next to an abyss,” the 52-year-old coffeeshop owner said.
Within hours after the attack, blackouts began throughout Kyiv after weeks of relatively steady power supply.
And while direct damage caused by the attack may not be significant, indirect losses are much higher, according to a Kyiv-based analyst.
“Those are a boost to migration, closedowns of plants, a general negative background and so on,” Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.
“Indirect losses are huge, they’re many times bigger than direct ones.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine responds to Russia’s aerial attacks almost in kind.
Dozens of Ukrainian drones have been shot down over western Russia this week alone, including eight flying towards Moscow, according to news reports.
A heavy drone was shot down on Wednesday near the Olenya military airbase that hosts the Tu-22M3 heavy bombers in Russia’s Murmansk region some 1,800km (1,118 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
Even though the attack failed, its distance makes some 2.6 million sq km (10 million sq miles) of western Russia – an area the size of Argentina – vulnerable to Ukrainian heavy drones, the Verstka online magazine calculated.
