Russia targeted Ukraine’s already battered infrastructure with more than 100 drones, rockets and missiles Friday, raining explosives on cities around the country as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy returned from a three-day trip across Europe to ask Ukraine’s allies to send more weapons and faster.
The strikes, the first heavy aerial barrage in weeks, came as fighting on the ground intensified, in what Ukrainian officials were calling a new winter offensive.
Russia has been pouring troops and equipment into eastern Ukraine, in the first stage of what Ukrainian and Western officials say will be a major push to swallow up more of the Donbas region before Kyiv can field more powerful armaments from the West and mount its own offensive.
The fighting has been especially heavy around the Russian-occupied city of Kreminna and the Ukrainian-held city of Bakhmut, about 30 miles apart in the Donbas, the mineral-rich region in the country’s east where separatists had waged a yearslong campaign to break away from Ukraine before the invasion.
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Russia has made small tactical gains over the past week, amid intense combat and heavy casualties on both sides, military analysts said, but as of Friday there was no evidence of a major breakthrough.
The Ukrainian air force described Friday’s aerial assault as a “massive attack” and said it had involved 71 cruise missiles, seven Iranian-made drones and about 35 S-300 missiles, anti-aircraft missiles that Russia has taken to using against targets on the ground. Ukraine said in a statement that it had shot down 61 of the cruise missiles and five of the drones, but it does not have the capability to intercept the S-300.
Ukrainian officials said that two of the Russian missiles, fired from ships in the Black Sea, had crossed the airspace of Romania, which is a NATO country, and Moldova, which is not, on their way to Ukraine. Romania rejected the claim that its airspace had been violated, which would have risked inflaming tensions between NATO and Moscow.
Zelenskyy has argued repeatedly for NATO to see itself as being endangered by Russia, too, trying to goad the alliance into getting more involved in the fight.
On the ground, Ukrainian forces Friday battled advancing Russians in the pine forests near Kreminna and held onto increasingly precarious defensive positions in the frozen trenches and battered buildings around the ruined city of Bakhmut, according to Ukrainian officials and military analysts.