Kyiv says it is almost ready to launch a huge ground assault to retake occupied land after Russia hurled missiles at cities as people slept, killing at least 17 people in its first large-scale air strikes in almost two months.
The war is coming to a crucial juncture after a months-long Russian winter offensive that gained little ground despite the bloodiest fighting so far.
Kyiv is preparing a counter-offensive using hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles sent by the West, hoping to drive Russia out of the fifth of the country it occupies and claims to have annexed.
“As soon as there is God’s will, the weather and a decision by commanders, we will do it,” Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleskii Reznikov told an online news briefing.
Ukraine was “to a high percentage ready” to launch its campaign, he said. Its new modern weapons would serve as an “iron fist”.
In the central town of Uman, firefighters battled a raging blaze at a residential apartment building struck on an upper floor by a Russian missile.
Killed in their sleep
Officials said at least 15 people were killed there, including at least two children.
The wave of Russian missile attacks overnight was the first since early March.
Russia had launched such attacks almost weekly for most of the winter, but they tapered off as spring arrived, with Western countries saying Moscow was running out of missiles.
In the southeastern city of Dnipro, a missile struck a house, killing a two-year-old child and a 31-year-old woman, regional governor Serhiy Lysak said.
The capital Kyiv was also rocked by explosions in the early hours, as were the central cities of Kremenchuk and Poltava, and Mykolaiv in the south.
Two people were wounded in the town of Ukrayinka just south of Kyiv, officials said.
The Ukrainian military said it had shot down 21 out of 23 cruise missiles fired by Russia. Moscow insists it does not deliberately target civilians.
Kyiv says strikes on cities far from the front lines have no military purpose apart from intimidating and harming civilians, a war crime.
“This Russian terror must face a fair response from Ukraine and the world,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote in a Telegram post alongside images of the wreckage. “And it will.”
All eyes on the weather
Closer to the front, in Donetsk, an eastern city controlled by Russian proxies since 2014, a Russian-installed official said seven people had been killed by Ukrainian shelling that hit a minibus.
Along hundreds of kilometres of front, Russia has been fortifying its territory for months in anticipation of Kyiv’s planned assault, widely expected once warmer weather dries out Ukraine’s notorious sucking black mud.
Kyiv and its Western military backers hope a push by thousands of Ukrainian troops trained at Western bases, using hundreds of newly donated tanks and armoured vehicles, will shift the dynamics of the war.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said this week Kyiv’s foreign allies and partners had delivered almost all their promised combat vehicles.
Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February last year, claiming the Kyiv government posed a threat.
Ukraine and its Western allies call it an unprovoked war of conquest.
-AAP
