Aftermath of a Russian missile strike in Kharkiv.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Kyiv, Ukraine — Russia on Sunday bombarded residential areas of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, with ballistic missiles and powerful guided bombs, wounding more than 40 civilians, Ukrainian officials said. The attack came hours after what Russian authorities said was a wave of drone attacks against energy facilities across Russia, including an oil refinery in Moscow.
At least 10 explosions rocked Kharkiv, a city of 1.3 million situated less than 25 miles from the Russian border, local officials said, warning that they expected the number of casualties to rise as emergency crews raced across the city to various blast sites.
The attack on Kharkiv came less than 48 hours after powerful Russian guided bombs hit the city Friday, striking a 12-story residential building and devastating a children’s park. At least six people were killed in those strikes, including a 14-year-old girl. In addition, 59 people were reported injured, with 20 in serious condition and some requiring amputations, Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv military administration, said in a statement.
In the attack Sunday, Syniehubov said that a post office, a sports complex, a shopping center, stores and cars were damaged. “The enemy targeted only civilian infrastructure,” Syniehubov said. In a later statement, he said that at least 41 people were wounded.
The Russian Ministry of Defense did not offer any immediate comment on the strikes in Kharkiv.
The city’s Palace of Sports, which features a 4,000-seat arena, was targeted by four strikes, Ukraine’s National Olympic Committee said in a statement. “The sports complex was destroyed,” the committee said.
Rescue workers searched for survivors in the rubble of the complex throughout the afternoon and into the evening.
Earlier, the Russian military claimed to have largely thwarted one of the largest Ukrainian drone assaults directed at Russia territory since the start of the full-scale war, and said it had shot down 158 drones across 15 regions.
Local officials in Russia reported fires and explosions caused by drone attacks at a number of facilities, including an oil refinery in Moscow and one of the largest energy production facilities in the central Russian region of Tver.
Military analysts confirmed geolocated footage showing a successful Ukrainian strike on the Moscow oil refinery in Kaputnya, which is only about 10 miles from the Kremlin.
“The inability of Russia’s air and missile defense systems to protect against relatively crude long-range, one-way drone attacks is surprising,” Fabian Hoffman, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who specializes in missile technology, wrote on the social platform X.
Many of the drones were directed at targets in the regions of Kursk, Bryansk, Voronezh and Belgorod, all of which border Ukraine, according to the Russian military. The reports by Russian officials could not be independently verified.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the continued attacks justified Ukraine’s efforts to bring the war directly to Russians on Russian territory.
“Every such strike on Kharkiv and our other cities and towns proves the correctness of our tactics, particularly in the Kursk region — we must push the war back to where it came from, into Russia,” he said Sunday in his nightly address. “And not just in the border areas. The terrorist state must feel what war truly is.”
The Ukrainian military has repeatedly targeted Russian oil and gas facilities in what it has said is an effort to undermine Russia’s ability to supply its forces with fuel and cut into the energy revenues that fund the Kremlin’s war effort.
It was difficult to assess the effect of the overnight attacks or the overall Ukrainian campaign. As the number of Ukrainian strikes has increased, Moscow has increasingly limited the information it releases on its oil industry.
Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service stopped publishing data on the production of oil products in the country this past week.
While Kyiv has been attacking oil facilities for months, the campaign has yet to have a demonstrable effect on the fighting inside Ukraine, where Russian forces have made steady gains throughout the summer in the eastern Donbas region.
The Russian advance in the direction of Pokrovsk, a vital logistics hub, threatens to undermine Ukraine’s ability to supply its forces across a broad swath of the front line.
And even as Ukraine steps up its strikes inside Russia, they still pale in comparison to the destruction wrought by Russian attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities since the war began in February 2022. Moscow has directed around 10,000 missiles, 14,000 long-range attack drones and 33,000 guided bombs at targets across Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military.
In the past week alone, Zelenskyy said, Russia used more than 160 missiles of various types, 780 guided aerial bombs and 400 attack drones to hit targets across Ukraine.
There did not appear to be any military facilities in the vicinity of several places hit in Kharkiv on Sunday. One strike site was a shopping area where the blast caused a fire from a gas pipe.
Another strike site visited by The New York Times was a residential area next to the sports complex. There was a massive crater in the middle of a children’s playground, a hole gouged in the earth near battered slides and seesaws.
A burst water main caused flooding across the whole neighborhood and residents scrambled to use the rubble from the blast site to hand build a dam in a futile attempt to stop water from inundating apartment blocks.
Given the advantages Russia holds in terms of troop numbers and firepower in the war, Ukraine has been employing a variety of asymmetric strategies.
These include an offensive into the Kursk region of western Russia, grabbing hundreds of square miles of territory in a matter of weeks, in an effort to force Moscow to pull resources from the Ukrainian front to defend its own land. So far, the Kremlin appears determined not to redeploy elements of the military engaged in offensive operations.
Ukrainian leaders have said their efforts to undermine the Russian war effort have been hampered by restrictions on the use of long-range weapons provided by its allies to hit targets inside Russia. The Biden administration has resisted changing the policy out of concern that it could lead to an escalation in the war and draw NATO into a more direct conflict with Moscow.
Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, traveled to Washington over the weekend to press the Biden administration to lift the restrictions, presenting senior officials with a list of military sites that Ukraine would like to hit as soon as the ban is lifted.
Ukraine is also desperate to find a way to limit Russia’s ability to unleash powerful guided bombs from warplanes that can be deployed from the relative safety of the skies above Russia by attacking the airfields where the aircraft begin their bombing runs.
“I appeal to the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany: We need the abilities to really and fully protect Ukraine and Ukrainians,” Zelenskyy said Saturday. “We require both: permissions for long-range use, and your long-range shells and missiles.”
At the same time as Kyiv presses its allies for support, Ukraine has been busy developing its own domestically produced long-range weapons. And Zelenskyy said last week that Ukraine had carried out a successful test of the first domestically produced ballistic missile.
He also recently announced the development of a “new class” of domestically produced, long-range strike weapons — a drone powered with a rocket engine.
But the weapons are still in the early stages of development, and Ukraine still has to largely rely on its expanding fleet of slow moving, fixed-wing drones to hit targets deep inside Russia.