Buildings in Kharkiv were damaged in the drone strikes, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on the Telegram online service. “These are not military installations, but cafes, residential buildings and offices”, emphasized the mayor. He did not provide any information about possible victims. “On New Year's Eve, the Russians want to intimidate our city, but we are not afraid,” Terekhov continued.
According to Russian information, Ukraine attacked the Russian city of Belgorod on Saturday. Thus, 22 people were killed. The Ministry of Defense in Moscow warned that the attack would not go “unpunished”. It was apparently the worst Ukrainian attack on Russian soil since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Moscow accused Kiev of using internationally banned cluster munitions in the attack. According to Ukrainian sources, 40 people were killed on Friday in one of the worst waves of Russian attacks on Ukraine.
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Ukraine: How important is international aid?
ISW: More major attacks expected
The US Institute for War Studies (ISW) had already warned of new waves of Russian attacks. “Russia will continue to conduct large-scale attacks against Ukraine to weaken Ukrainian morale and Ukraine’s ability to sustain its war effort against Russia,” the ISW report said Friday.
At the same time, analysts stressed that after almost two years of aggressive warfare, Russia is unlikely to be able to regularly attack on a large scale with missiles, given its reserves and production capabilities, but more consistently with drones. .
Portal/Yevhen Titov Firefighters put out fire after wave of attacks
According to an ISW analysis, in preparation for the devastating bombing raid on Friday night, the Russians had already experimented for months with various combinations of drones and missiles to discover weaknesses in the Ukrainian air defense system. According to Western experts, it is likely that Russia will try, as it did last winter, to disrupt Ukraine's electricity and gas supplies in order to demoralize the people.
Lavrov: 200 Ukrainian soldiers sentenced
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russian courts had sentenced more than 200 Ukrainian fighters to prison terms since the start of the military operation in Ukraine.
“The courts of the Russian Federation have already sentenced more than 200 representatives of Ukrainian armed formations to long prison terms for committing atrocities,” Lavrov said in an interview with the state news agency RIA Novosti.
Repeated attacks on civilian targets
Russia began its war of aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and has repeatedly fired at civilian targets far behind the front. Last winter, energy supply facilities, in particular, were targeted by Russian attacks. Experts warn against repeating this tactic this winter. Moscow's objective is to plunge Ukrainians into cold and darkness in order to break the population's will to resist.