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By Michael Wasiura
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On Monday morning, Russian forces fired a barrage of missiles at civilian targets across Ukraine. Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi reported that, as of 10:55a.m. Kyiv time, 41 out of the 75 total Russian rockets fired had been intercepted by Ukrainian air defense systems. Ukrainian media reported strikes in 16 cities across the country, including in the capital Kyiv, where a popular park and a cosmetics warehouse were among the targets hit.
The wave of strikes is widely understood to be Russia's retaliation for an explosion this past Saturday on the Kerch Strait Bridge, mainland Russia's logistical link to occupied Crimea. The bridge bombing, which disrupted both civilian traffic and Russian military supply shipments to its forces in occupied Kherson and Zaporozhia regions, is widely understood to have been carried out by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
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The cosmetics warehouse which was struck this morning by a Russian rocket belonged to Lamel, a UK-based company founded by Ukrainian entrepreneur Natalia Iaromenko. On Saturday, in the aftermath of the Kerch Bridge strike, Lamel's official Instagram page had posted a "story" that featured the burning bridge.
On Sunday, pro-Kremlin outlet Life News published an article on the topic of the Lamel Instagram post. On Monday, Russian independent online news outlet Baza confirmed that Lamel's Kyiv warehouse was among the targets hit by the 41 Russian missiles that managed to evade Ukrainian air defense systems.
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As demolished civilian cars burned on Kyiv's Taras Shevchenko Boulevard, Russian state media figures celebrated the strikes.
"I doubt that the Ukrainian Postal Service, which issued stamps featuring an explosion on the Crimean bridge a few hours after the blast, will be able to so quickly pull off the release of stamps with morning views of Kyiv, Lviv, Dnepropetrovsk, Zhytomyr, Vinnitsa, Ternopil, Kharkov, Ivano-Frankivsk, Khmelnitsky, Vyshgorod and many others places in Ukraine," Sergey Mardan, a morning show host on Komsomolskaya Pravda Radio posted to his official Telegram channel.
In Ukraine itself, however, the mood was significantly different. Residents of Kyiv, Odesa, and Lviv told Newsweek they were experiencing a range of emotions ranging from fear to anger. They reported that, for the first time in months, they were sitting in bomb shelters and apartment corridors. Social media circulated videos of Kyivans taking cover in the city's metro stations.
Ukrainian civilians told Newsweek that commitment to their country's self-defense efforts had not been shaken by the Russian missile attacks.
"They will not scare us," said Yuri in Kyiv. "They only make us stronger."
"Just tell Biden to send us better air defense systems," Sergey in Odesa said.
When the air raid sirens were finally turned off at a few minutes after noon local time, everyday life in Kyiv returned to something more or less approaching normal.
At an official level, presidential advisor Mikhail Podolyak took to Telegram to share his thoughts.
"Large-scale rocket attacks on the centers of Ukrainian cities are evidence of the terrorist nature of the Russian regime," Podolyak wrote. "The mask is off: this is the targeted mass killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure."
"This is, unquestionably, the dying convulsions of a wounded beast," he added. "They can't fight on the battlefield, and so they hit civilians with rockets."
This is a developing news story. More information will be added as it becomes available.
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