This Saturday morning, kyiv suffered the largest bombardment with Shahed drone bombs of the entire war. 75 of these Iranian-made unmanned aircraft have been fired by Russia in more than five hours of alarm. The Ukrainian Air Force has shot down 71 of these drones, causing five injuries in the capital. Authorities see the attack as the signal for a new bombing campaign to disrupt essential energy services during the winter. Air Force spokesman Yuri Ihnat revealed in a televised statement that the drones used by Russia are improved versions of the models originally provided by Iran. Ihnat specified that the devices are now covered by a layer of carbon fiber, a material that makes their detection by radar more difficult. Additionally, the new Shaheds are painted black, unlike their previous gray color, for night operations, making them less visible.
The vast majority of the Shahed have targeted kyiv, although five other provinces have also suffered the arrival of drone bombs. The alarm in the capital began shortly after three in the morning, but it was not until five that the fire reached its greatest intensity. Between five and eight thirty, the city has been affected by constant explosions from anti-aircraft machine guns, also by the characteristic noise of the Shahed engine flying over the very center of Kiev.
The five injured have suffered the impact of drone debris over the urban area. The mayor of kyiv, Vitalii Klitschko, has confirmed that among the victims is a minor under 11 years old. A daycare center was also destroyed as a result of the attack.
Russia had significantly reduced its bombing away from the war front since June. Both the Ukrainian government and NATO intelligence services assume that Moscow is reserving long-range munitions to carry out a campaign to disrupt the energy system, as happened in 2022. Between October of last year and January 2023, Russian air forces periodically attacked the entire Ukrainian territory, with the power grid as the main target. For months, millions of Ukrainians lived in large cities with constant cuts in heating, electricity and hot water services.
The British Ministry of Defense indicated on November 21 that the Kremlin is preparing for its winter campaign: “Russia has refrained in recent months from firing its main cruise missiles from its bomber fleet, possibly to accumulate a large arsenal. The possible reason for this is so that they can be used if they decide to repeat last year’s effort to destroy critical Ukrainian infrastructure.
The attack on Kiev has followed the same parameters as a smaller wave that occurred on November 18, with the Shahed firing from Russian territory in the north and east, and also from the south. The Ukrainian Air Force notifies the population through military accounts on social networks of the arrival of the threat from a certain territory. Based on this information, the special envoy of EL PAÍS has been able to follow the choreography that created the light sources and the anti-aircraft ammunition according to the origin of each new wave of drones.
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The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has stressed that the bombing has coincided with the annual commemoration of the Holodomor, the famine ordered by Stalin in the 1930s that caused the death of millions of rural Ukrainians. Ukraine considers Holodomor as an attempted genocide by the Soviet authorities, although famines also occurred in other parts of the Soviet Union. “Russian leaders seem proud of their ability to kill people,” Zelensky wrote on his social media pages.
The vast majority of the Shahed have been shot down, but Russia, as the Ukrainian Air Force has explained on previous occasions, does not primarily seek to destroy ground targets with these devices: the main logic of the Shahed waves is to identify the location of the defenses. and consume the anti-aircraft ammunition. kyiv is one of the cities with the best anti-aircraft protection in the world thanks to the supply of weapons from its NATO allies. The German Government confirmed this week that the new military aid package for Ukraine, valued at 1.3 billion euros, includes four batteries of Iris-T anti-aircraft rockets, the best anti-aircraft defense system that Ukraine has along with missiles. American Patriot.
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