Russian forces showered Ukraine with more missiles and munition-carrying drones Tuesday after widespread strikes killed at least 19 people in an attack the UN human rights office described as “particularly shocking” and amounting to potential war crimes.
Air raid warnings sounded throughout the country for a second straight morning as Ukrainian officials advised residents to conserve energy and stock up on water. Strikes in the capital and 12 other regions Monday caused widespread power outages and pierced the relative calm that had returned to Kyiv and many other cities far from the war's front lines.
"It brings anger, not fear," Kyiv resident Volodymyr Vasylenko, 67, said as crews worked to restore traffic lights and clear debris from the city's streets. “We already got used to this. And we will keep fighting.
The leaders of the Group of Seven industrial powers condemned the bombardment and said they would “stand firmly with Ukraine for as long as it takes.” Their pledge flew in the face of Russian warnings that Western assistance would prolong the war and the pain of Ukraine's people.
Russia launched the widespread attacks in retaliation for a weekend explosion that damaged a bridge linking the country to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Russian President Vladimir Putin alleged the Ukrainian special services masterminded the Saturday attack on the Kerch Bridge.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged the G-7 leaders during a virtual meeting Tuesday to hit Russia's energy sector with tougher sanctions and said, There can be no dialogue with this leader of Russia, who has no future."
"Now, one person is blocking peace - and this person is in Moscow,” Zelenskyy said.
Ukrainian officials said the previous day's diffuse strikes on power plants and civilian areas made no “practical military sense.” However, Putin's supporters had urged the Kremlin for weeks to take more drastic steps in Ukraine and actively criticized the Russian military for a series of embarrassing battlefield setbacks.
Pro-Kremlin pundits lauded Monday's attack as an appropriate and long-awaited response to Kyiv's recently successful counteroffensives, and many of them argued that Moscow should keep up the intensity in order to win a war now in its eighth month.
The bombardment Tuesday struck both energy infrastructure and civilian areas, just as Monday's attacks did. One person was killed when 12 missiles slammed into public facilities in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, setting off a large fire, the State Emergency Service said. A local official said the missiles hit a school, residential buildings and medical facilities.
Energy facilities in the western Lviv and Vinnitsya regions also took hits. Although officials said Ukrainian forces shot down an inbound Russian missile before it reached Kyiv, the capital region experienced rolling power outages as a result of the previous day's deadly strikes.
The governor of the Mykolaiv region, Vitaliy Kim, urged residents to remain in bomb shelters as “there are enough missiles still in the air.”
The State Emergency Service said 19 people died and 105 people were wounded in Monday's strikes. At least five of the victims were in Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. More than 300 cities and towns lost power, from the capital to Lviv on the border with Poland.
Beside the usual sirens, a new type of loud alarm that blared automatically from mobile phones jolted Kyiv residents early Tuesday. A text message warning of the possibility of missile strikes accompanied the caustic-sounding alert.
A spokesperson for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said Tuesday that strikes on “civilian objects,” including infrastructure such as power plants, could qualify as a war crime.
“Damage to key power stations and lines ahead of the upcoming winter raises further concerns for the protection of civilians and in particular the impact on vulnerable populations,” Ravina Shamdasani told reporters at a UN briefing in Geneva. “Attacks targeting civilians and objects indispensable to the survival of civilians are prohibited under international humanitarian law.”
As Ukrainian forces grew increasingly bold following a series of counteroffensive successes, a cornered Kremlin ratcheted up Cold War-era rhetoric in the last month and fanned concerns it might broaden the war and use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addressed the issue Tuesday, saying Moscow would only resort to that if the Russian state faced imminent destruction. Speaking on state TV, he accused the West of encouraging false speculation about the Kremlin's intentions.
Russia's nuclear doctrine envisions “exclusively retaliatory measures intended to prevent the destruction of the Russian Federation as a result of direct nuclear strikes or the use of other weapons that raise the threat for the very existence of the Russian state,” Lavrov said.
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the 30-nation military alliance would hold long-planned exercises next week to test the state of readiness of its nuclear capabilities.
The exercise, dubbed “Steadfast Noon,” is held annually. It involves fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear warheads but does not any live bombs. Conventional jets, and surveillance and refueling aircraft routinely take part.
Stoltenberg said Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear rhetoric over the war in Ukraine is “irresponsible,” and he said that “Russia knows that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.”
In their statement after hearing from Zelenskyy, the G-7 leaders said they were “undeterred and steadfast in our commitment to providing the support Ukraine needs to uphold its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
“We will hold President (Vladimir) Putin and those responsible to account” for this week's strikes, saying “indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilian populations constitute a war crime.”
The pledge appeared to come in response to Kremlin warnings that Western military assistance, including training Ukrainian soldiers in NATO countries and feeding real-time satellite data to target Russian forces, increasingly made Ukraine's allies parties to the conflict.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said continued US weapons deliveries to Ukraine would prolong the fighting and inflict more damage on the country without changing Russia's objectives.
