Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, was hit by a wave of Russian airstrikes Thursday night and Friday morning as Russia’s full-scale assault on its neighbor continued for the 1,500th day, Ukrainian officials said.
According to local authorities in Kharkiv, just 40 kilometers from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine, four rocket attacks overnight and at least 20 drones struck the city, damaging homes and offices and injuring five people, including an eight-year-old girl.
The rockets were reportedly followed by repeated drone strikes, with Moscow deploying Iranian-made Martyr drones equipped with jet engines, which can cover the short distance from Russia to Kharkiv so quickly that they are difficult to shoot down.
In the capital Kiev and surrounding areas, “massive” Russian missile and drone attacks killed at least one person during the day on Friday, Mykola Kalashnik, the head of the local military administration, said.
Ukrainian officials said at least two people were killed and dozens of others injured in Russian attacks across Ukraine on Thursday.
The attacks come as US-brokered peace talks have stalled in recent weeks.
Ukraine: Russia is using ‘new strategy’
“We see that the enemy is using new routes, increasingly modernized drones and new tactics,” Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Ihnat said on state television. They reported more than 400 drone attacks and ten ballistic missile attacks across the country in the last 24 hours.
It is the second time this week that Russia has followed up an overnight drone attack with a massive daytime strike – it appears to be a new tactic as Moscow investigates ways to penetrate Ukraine’s air defenses.
“The enemy is pressing forward [pressure] On our population, the work of some public institutions as well as educational institutions has been paralyzed,” Ihnat said.
The scale of the ongoing attacks is so large that Poland even scrambled fighter planes, the Polish Armed Forces confirmed on Friday morning.
“Due to the activity of long-range aviation of the Russian Federation, which is carrying out attacks on the territory of Ukraine, military aviation operations have begun in our airspace,” the Polish military wrote on social media. “Duty jets have been deployed, and ground-based air defense systems as well as radar reconnaissance have reached a state of maximum readiness.”
Russia: Ukrainian drone stopped
Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry claims to have intercepted 192 Ukrainian drones overnight which, based on their flight paths, were likely targeting oil export facilities near the northern port city of St. Petersburg.
In Moscow, one-time Russian President and outspoken firebrand Dmitry Medvedev said Russia should abandon a “tolerant attitude” toward Ukraine’s possible future membership in the EU.
Medvedev claimed, “The EU is no longer just an economic union; it could rapidly turn into a full-blown military alliance, extremely hostile towards Russia and in some ways even worse.”
“Now is the time to adopt a tolerant attitude towards our neighbors joining a military-economic EU,” he said.
Medvedev said that, although he did not believe the United States would leave the NATO military alliance as President Donald Trump has threatened, Washington could take symbolic steps such as cutting the number of US troops deployed in other NATO countries.
He said the “obvious divisions” within NATO could push the EU towards becoming more than just an economic union.
Edited by: Carl Sexton