Air raid sirens sounded across the country
Officials warned of possible missile strikes from Russian forces on Friday, urging citizens to take cover as air raid sirens sounded across the country. Several cities reported already being targeted.
“There is a big threat of the missile attack. I want to stress again — do not ignore the air alert sirens,” said the head of Kyiv city military administration, Serhiy Popko.
The alarm was raised after warnings that Russia had launched Tu-95 strategic bombers. There were reports that other planes had been launched from Belarus.
“Enemy aviation is in the air and ships which can carry Kaliber missiles are in the sea. The enemy launched the missiles. The air alert will be long,” said Maksym Marchenko, governor of the southern region of Odesa. “Please do not ignore the air alert sirens, and go to the shelters.”
The Kyiv Independent said that several explosions have been reported in the Dnipropetrovsk region and that seven more missiles have been fired at the Kryvyi Rih area, according to Oleksandr Vilkul, head of that city’s military administration.
This is part of “Russia’s latest massive missile attack in Ukraine, using cruise missiles launched both from the air and from the sea,” according to the governor of the Mykolaiv region, Viitaliy Kim, who said that some 20 missiles were launched in the first wave of attacks.
The warnings came after Moscow’s military struck critical infrastructure in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and launched multiple strikes on energy infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia in the early hours of Friday.
Moldova said a Russian missile had violated its airspace on Friday morning and summoned the Russian ambassador to make a formal protest.
The country’s foreign ministry said Moscow’s ambassador would be summoned “to indicate to the Russian side the unacceptable violation of our airspace by a Russian missile that today flew over the sovereign territory of the Republic of Moldova.”
Ukraine’s top general, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, had earlier said two Russian Kaliber missiles had crossed into Romanian and Moldovan airspace before entering Ukraine.
Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, said the missiles had been launched from the Black Sea and had entered Moldovan airspace. They then flew into Romanian airspace, before entering Ukraine.
However, the defense ministry of NATO member Romania said the missile flew some 35 kilometers (about 22 miles) northeast of its border.
“The Romanian Air Force’s surveillance system detected on Friday an air target, most likely a cruise missile launched from a Russian ship in the Black Sea near the Crimean Peninsula,” the ministry said in a statement.
“The closest the target trajectory got to Romania’s airspace was recorded by the radar at roughly 35 kilometers northeast of the border.”
A pro-Russian breakaway regime has ruled part of Moldova’s territory, Transnistria, since the early 1990s after a war. Moldova’s intelligence service on Thursday warned that Russia was acting to destabilize the country, which was formerly part of the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper quoted a Ukrainian air force spokesperson saying separately that Ukraine had the ability to shoot down the missiles. However, it did not do so for fear of endangering civilians in foreign countries.
Credit to : DW News