Missile Strikes on Ukraine Kill One Person, Zelensky Says Russians in League ‘With the Devil’

KYIV (Reuters) – Russia fired more than 20 cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine on Saturday, killing at least one person in Kyiv, in attacks President Volodymyr Zelensky said showed Moscow was in league with the devil.

The second barrage of major Russian missile attacks in three days badly damaged a Kyiv hotel and a residential building. Energy Minister German Galushchenko said the strikes had not caused serious damage to the national power system.

Russia has been attacking vital Ukraine infrastructure since October with barrages of missile and drones, causing sweeping power blackouts as the cold weather bites.

At least a dozen people were injured in the attacks. A Japanese journalist was among the wounded and taken to a hospital, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company, later said it had canceled emergency power outages in Kyiv and the surrounding region.

Zelensky in comments addressed to Russian speakers said President Vladimir Putin was destroying Russia’s future.

“No one will forgive you for terror. No one in the world will forgive you for this. Ukraine will not forgive,” he said, reiterating calls for allies to supply more anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems.

Army chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi said air defenses shot down 12 incoming cruise missiles, including six around the Kyiv region, five in the Zhytomyrskiy region and one in the Khmeltnytskiy region.

The cruise missiles had been launched from strategic bombers over the Caspian Sea hundreds of miles away and from land-based launchers, he said on social media.

“Russia’s mass missile attack is deliberately targeting residential areas, not even our energy infrastructure,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on social media after the attack.

Other cities across Ukraine also came under fire. In the southern region of Mykolaiv, local governor Vitaliy Kim said that six people had been wounded.

Kim in a separate post on social media said Russia had targeted civilians with the strikes, something Moscow has previously denied. “According to today’s tendencies, the occupiers are striking not just critical [infrastructure] … in many cities [they are targeting] simply residential areas, hotels, garages, roads.”

In the western city of Khmelnytskyi, two people were wounded in a drone attack, Ukrainian presidential aide Kyrylo Tymoshenko said. He also reported a strike in the southern industrial city of Zaporizhzhia, which Tymoshenko said had damaged residential buildings.

Ukraine’s Defense ministry responded on social media by saying: “With each new missile attack on civilian infrastructure, more and more Ukrainians are convinced of the need to fight until the complete collapse of Putin’s regime.”