Ukraine came under heavy attack from the air and from cyberspace Tuesday, local officials said, as nearly 600 Russian shells, rockets and other projectiles rained down on a southern region and unidentified hackers knocked out phone and internet services of the country’s biggest telecom provider.
Ukraine also claimed a successful hacker attack against Russia’s national tax system.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived on Capitol Hill to press Congress for additional military help, as further U.S. funding is uncertain due to a domestic political dispute.
One person was killed and four injured during 24 hours of Russian bombardment of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, according to Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the regional military administration. The number of projectiles fired at Kherson was the highest in at least two weeks.
As winter sets in and hampers troop movements, air bombardment plays a growing role.
Cyberattacks are also a busy battleground. Ukrainian telecom provider Kyivstar said it came under a “powerful” attack by hackers. The company serves more than 24 million mobile customers across the country.
“The war with Russia has many dimensions, and one of them is in cyberspace,” Kyivstar Director-General Oleksandr Komarov said in a statement.
The company did not estimate when services might be restored. It said its specialists were working with law enforcement agencies and special state services on solving the problem.
Also, a Ukrainian online bank said it fought off a massive distributed denial-of-service attack on Tuesday. A DDoS attack employs a network of distributed computers to direct junk traffic at the target site in an effort to render it unusable.
At the same time, Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence claimed to have conducted a successful hacker operation infesting Russia’s Federal Taxation Service servers with malware.
According to an intelligence agency statement, the operation infiltrated several central servers and more than 2,300 regional servers, resulting in disrupted communication within Russia's taxation system and destroying its database and backups.
Moscow made no immediate comment about any attack, and the claim could not be independently verified.
In other developments, Ukraine claimed to have captured a tactically important hill in the Donetsk region, where the front line has barely budged since 2014.
Zelenskyy announced on social media that his troops had taken the foothold, which provides a vantage point over the front line near Pivdenne, a mining town to the northwest of the Donetsk city of Horlivka.
