Russia pounds Ukraine with missiles, drones for second day in row, Kyiv says

 Four people killed across Ukraine - officials by Reuters

It comes after over 200 missiles, drones launched on Monday.

Bloggers describe attacks as "retaliation" for Kursk raid

KYIV, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Russia launched several waves of missile and drone strikes on scores of Ukrainian regions and killed at least four people from them, Ukraine's military reported early on Tuesday, in a day after its widest air raid of the war on the neighbor.

Regional officials said two people were killed when a hotel had been "wiped out" in the central Ukraine city of Kryvyi Rih. Separately, two more died in drone strikes on the nearby city of Zaporizhzhia, east of Kryvyi Rih.

The military administration of the region reported that air defence systems in the Kyiv region had been repeatedly deployed overnight to repel missiles and drones that targeted the capital of Ukraine.

Reuters' witnesses heard at least three rounds of explosions overnight in Kyiv.

In an attack U.S. President Joe Biden called "outrageous, opens new tab," Russian forces struck with more than 200 missiles and drones on Monday, killing at least seven and damaging energy infrastructure. 

Analysts at the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War said in their note late on Monday that Moscow "likely lacks the defense-industrial capacity to sustain such massive strikes at a similar scale with regularity."

Several military bloggers from Russia, including the popular pro-war collective that publishes under the name Rybar, described the attacks in Moscow as an "act of retaliation" against Ukraine's surprise incursion into Russian soil, the first since World War Two.

Ukraine  Action:

On Monday, the Kremlin said there would be a response to Ukraine's action in Kursk, but three weeks into the incursion Kyiv says further advances. Moscow says it keeps pounding Ukraine troops there - but is still unable to push them out.

The exact scale and full extent of Tuesday's attacks wasn't immediately clear, but Ukraine's air force said it had registered the launch of several groups of drones as well as the takeoff from Russian airfields of strategic bombers Tu-85 and supersonic interceptor aircraft MiG-31s. 

 

Reuters could not independently confirm the reports. Russia had made no comment on the reports by presstime.

The Kremlin has rejected the assertion on killing civilians in the said war which President Vladimir Putin ordered to be waged on Russia's smaller neighbour with a full-blown invasion in February 2022.

The Russian defence ministry said that its strikes on Monday hit "all designated targets" in Ukraine's critical energy infrastructure.

Kryvyi Rih, Kyiv and central and eastern regions of Ukraine were under air raid alerts for most of the night, starting at around 2000 GMT on Monday.

Two civilians may be still under the rubble of the hotel in Kryvyi Rih and five were injured in the attack, Serhiy Lisak, the governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region where Kryvyi Rih is located, said on Telegram.

He also stated that there were six shops, four high-rise buildings, and eight cars that were damaged.

Odesska region: two killed, four injured overnight in Zaporizhzhia. It was said by the governor of Zaporizhzhia region Ivan Fedorov in Telegram, "This is the aftermath of what Iranians call a Shahed drone strike overnight against Zaporizhzhia," said Fedorov, referring to Iranian-made kamikaze drones that Kyiv says Russia employs in its strikes.