Ukrainian forces use missiles to strike Russian air defenses

Ukrainian armed forces launched missiles that destroyed several Russian targets in the occupied Donetsk region, Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Tuesday. The midnight strikes targeted both Russian missile launchers and radar systems in the region, located in eastern Ukraine, Syrskyi said.

Ukrainian forces have launched dozens of missile strikes on Russian air defense systems throughout the region in recent days, Syrskyi said on social media. The missile attacks create favorable conditions for Ukrainian aircraft looking to carry out strikes on other Russian targets, according to a translation of his statements.

Are Russian strikes on Ukraine still taking place? Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday said that over the previous week, Russia attacked Ukrainian targets with nearly a thousand guided aerial bombs, drones, and missiles. Zelenskyy called on Western countries to provide Ukraine with stronger defenses to stop the attacks.

What does Russia have to say? The Russian state-run news agency TASS reported on Tuesday that Russian forces carried out successful military operations against Ukrainian forces in more than 120 locations over the previous day. Russian forces beat back Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv area in northeast Ukraine, TASS reported. In doing so, the Kremlin’s forces killed or wounded roughly 230 Ukrainian soldiers. Russian forces destroyed two Ukrainian ammunition depots around Dnipro in the central-eastern part of the country. Russian troops from the Kremlin’s Western, Central, and Southern battlegroups also inflicted hundreds of casualties each on Kyiv’s forces, TASS reported.

Dig deeper: Read my report in The Sift from last week about how Zelenskyy spent much of the past week in Washington, D.C. asking NATO member countries for assistance.