The people of Ukraine faced a dismal start to 2023 as renewed Russian missile and drone strikes followed a devastating New Year’s Eve attack across the country, authorities said.
Air raid sirens rang out in the capital Kyiv just after midnight on Sunday, followed by a barrage of missiles that interrupted small celebrations residents were holding at home due to the wartime curfew. As the sirens wailed, some people shouted from their balconies: “Glory to Ukraine! Honor the heroes!”
Another strike on Sunday afternoon in the southern Zaporizhia region killed one person, according to the head of the regional military administration, Alexander Starukh.
In a video address on Sunday evening, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the “sense of unity, of authenticity, of life itself” among its citizens. Russia, he said, “will not take a single year from Ukraine. You will not take away our independence. We won’t give them anything.”
“Drones, missiles, anything else will not help them,” he said of the Russians. “Because we stand together. They are united only by fear.”
Ukrainian air and ground forces shot down 45 Iranian-made explosive drones fired by Russia on Saturday night and before sunrise on Sunday, Zelenskyy said. Iran denies supplying arms to Russia.
“Of course, it was difficult to celebrate fully because we understand that our soldiers cannot be with their families,” Evheniya Shulzhenko said while sitting with her husband on a park bench overlooking Kyiv.
But a “really powerful” New Year’s Eve speech by Zelensky lifted her spirits and made her proud to be Ukrainian, Zhuzhenko said. She recently moved to Kyiv after living in Bakhmut and Kharkiv, two cities that have seen some of the heaviest fighting since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
Multiple explosions rocked the capital and other areas of Ukraine on Saturday and overnight, injuring dozens. A photographer from the Associated Press news agency saw the body of a woman at the scene of an explosion in Kyiv with her husband and son standing nearby.
The largest university in Ukraine, the National Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv, reported significant damage to buildings and campus. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said two schools were damaged, including a kindergarten.
Instead of the New Year’s fireworks, Oleksander Dugyn said he and his friends and family watched in Kyiv the sparks caused by Ukrainian air defense forces repelling Russian attacks.
“We already know the sound of rockets, we know the moment they fly, we know the sound of drones. The sound is like the rumble of a moped,” said Dugin, who was walking in the park with his family. “We’re holding out as best we can”
Russia said Sunday that its New Year’s attacks targeted “facilities of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex” involved in the production of drones.
The Russian Ministry of Defense announced that “storage sites and launch sites” for the drones had also been destroyed. “The plans of the Kiev regime to carry out terrorist attacks against Russia in the near future have been foiled.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyi, said Russia’s New Year’s attacks were targeting central areas of major cities, noting a change in Moscow’s tactics.
“Russia has run out of military targets and is trying to kill as many civilians as possible and destroy more civilian facilities,” he tweeted. “A war to kill.”
The attacks came 36 hours after Russia launched widespread rocket attacks to damage energy infrastructure facilities on Thursday. The unusually rapid follow-up on Saturday alerted Ukrainian officials. Russia has been conducting airstrikes on Ukraine’s electricity and water supplies almost weekly since October, while its ground forces struggle to hold ground and advance.
Nighttime shelling in parts of the southern city of Kherson killed one person and blew out hundreds of windows at a children’s hospital, according to the president’s deputy chief of staff Kyrylo Tymoshenko. Ukrainian forces recaptured the city in November after Russian forces retreated across the Dnieper River bisecting the Kherson region.
When shells hit the children’s hospital on Saturday night, surgeons that night operated on a 13-year-old boy who had been seriously injured in a nearby village, Kherson governor Yaroslav Yanushevych said. The boy was taken to a hospital in Mykolayiv, about 99 kilometers away, in serious condition.
Elsewhere, a 22-year-old woman died from wounds in a rocket attack on Saturday in the eastern city of Khmelnytskyi, the city’s mayor said.
While Russia’s bombings have left many Ukrainians without heating and electricity to keep up with the remaining electricity supply due to damage or controlled blackouts, Ukraine’s state grid operator said on Sunday there would be no electricity cuts for one day.
“The energy industry is doing everything to ensure that the New Year holidays are bright without restrictions,” said energy supplier Ukrenergo. Companies and industry have made cuts to enable the additional electricity for households.
In Russia, Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the southern Belgorod region on the border with Ukraine, said night shelling on the outskirts of the city of Shebekino damaged homes, but there were no casualties.
Russian media also reported several Ukrainian attacks on Moscow-controlled parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with local officials saying at least nine people were injured.
Russian state news agency RIA quoted a local doctor as saying six people were killed in an attack on a hospital in Donetsk on Saturday. Deputy authorities in Donetsk also said one person was killed by Ukrainian shelling.
An independent verification of the reports was not possible.