Russia unleashes missile barrage on Ukraine hours before Moscow security conference

Russian forces unleashed a barrage of missiles on regions across Ukraine early Tuesday, killing civilians and damaging infrastructure. The barrage came just hours before top Russian military officials and their counterparts from Asia, the Middle East and Africa gathered outside Moscow for a security conference, as Russia’s war nears the 18-month mark. The Ukrainian air force said Russia fired 28 cruise missiles at the country. Sixteen were intercepted, it said in a statement. “Deliberate large-scale attacks on civilians. Solely for the sake of killing and psychological pressure,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Podolyak added that the barrage was “an undeniable manifestation” of Russia’s “terrorist activity, legally documented by numerous destructions and victims”. Missiles hit the western region of Lviv, wounding 19 people, including a 10-year-old, Lviv Governor Maksym Kozytskyi reported. Forty buildings and houses were damaged in the region that borders Poland, including in the city of Lviv, and the power grid was also damaged. In the neighbouring region of Volyn, three people were killed and three were injured, according to Oleksii Kuleba, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office. In the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, two people were injured. Russian forces also hit several other places, including a grocery warehouse in Kramatorsk, a city in the front-line Donetsk region in the east, killing one person and wounding another. The countrywide barrage came a day after Russian forces unleashed a wave of missile and drone strikes on Odesa, a non-front-line region in the country’s southwest. The Kremlin’s forces have recently pummelled it, hitting facilities that transport Ukraine’s crucial grain exports and also wrecking cherished Ukrainian historical sites. The repeated attacks there follow Moscow’s decision to break off a landmark agreement that had allowed grain to flow from Ukraine to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia and help reduce the threat of hunger. Meanwhile, top Russian military officials and their counterparts from Belarus, China, India, Middle Eastern and African nations gathered near Moscow for a security conference on Tuesday. In a pre-recorded video statement, Russian President Vladimir Putin once again accused the West of fuelling the conflict “by pumping billions of dollars” into Kyiv and “supplying it with equipment, weapons, ammunition, sending their military advisers and mercenaries”. He said that “everything is being done to ignite the conflict even more, to draw other states into it”. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu sought to downplay the significance of western support for Ukraine, saying that despite it, Kyiv’s forces “fail to achieve results on the battlefield”. He said Ukraine’s ability to fight had been “almost exhausted” and said the war had exposed vulnerabilities in Western weapons systems. The war has sown devastation across swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine, killed or injured hundreds of thousands and triggered the biggest rupture in Russia’s ties with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In a rare public speech, Shoigu said that ‘in the special military operation, the Russian army has debunked many myths about the superiority of Western military standards”, according to a text supplied by his ministry. “The preliminary results of combat operations show that Ukraine’s military resources are almost exhausted,” added Shoigu, one of Putin’s most powerful allies. He did not give detailed evidence to back up either statement. Reuters was refused accreditation to attend the security conference by the defence ministry. No reason was given. The West casts the war as Moscow’s biggest strategic blunder since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Western leaders say they want to defeat Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine. A Ukrainian counteroffensive has so far failed to yield major territorial success. Russia says it will achieve all its aims in Ukraine, which it casts as a puppet of the West. It has repeatedly indicated it is prepared to fight a long war and has put swathes of its US$2 trillion economy on a war footing. North backs Russia’s ‘battle for justice’ as Kim shows off missiles to minister Shoigu said he would share details about the weaknesses of Western weapons and that none were invulnerable. “We have data on … the destruction of German tanks, American armoured vehicles, British missiles and other weapons systems,” he said. “We are ready to share our assessments ... with our partners.” Shoigu accused Ukraine of repeatedly using civilian infrastructure to hide soldiers and heavy military equipment and that Kyiv had shelled civilian settlements in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine. Ukraine, he said, had used the Black Sea grain deal as a cover for building up stores of weapons and munitions in Odesa and other ports. Ukraine has repeatedly denied using civilian infrastructure for military purposes and denies any targeting of civilians. In remarks aimed at China, Shoigu said the West was intentionally stoking the situation around Taiwan, comparing the situation to the Ukraine war. “Under these conditions, bilateral relations between Russia and China have surpassed the level of strategic ties in all respects, becoming more than just allied,” Shoigu said. Additional reporting by Reuters