Air alert in Ukraine after Russian bombers take off

Air alerts were triggered across almost all of Ukraine on Monday morning due to the takeoff of a large number of Russian bombers, after a series of strikes that left at least six dead overnight in the south of the country.

“Attention! Missile danger throughout Ukraine! MiG-31K taking off,” the Ukrainian Air Force wrote in a message on Telegram. She also announced that eight Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers were heading towards Ukraine. The Tu-95s are long-range bombers developed under the Soviet Union and capable of carrying cruise missiles. The MiG-31 is an interception and attack aircraft, often used to accompany strategic bombers.

During the night, at least six people were killed and around twenty others injured in Russian attacks in Mykolaiv and Zaporizhia, in the south of the country, according to local authorities. “Fires have broken out in residential buildings in the city and all emergency services are on the ground,” the governor of the Mykolaiv region, Vitaly Kim, said on Telegram, reporting five deaths and one hurt.

Mykolaiv, located a little more than 50 km from the Dnieper River which constitutes the front line between the Ukrainian and Russian armies in this area, had until now been relatively spared from attacks by Moscow forces since kyiv’s resumption of the large neighboring city of Kherson in November 2022. In the city of Zaporizhia, frequently targeted by Russian forces, airstrikes left one dead and 21 injured during the night from Sunday to Monday, according to the regional governor Ivan Fedorov.

On the Russian side, the Ministry of Defense announced that it had intercepted four Ukrainian drones in the Voronezh region, bordering Ukraine. The previous night, both sides had carried out drone attacks on an unprecedented scale. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have neutralized 34 drones in the Moscow region on Sunday morning, a record in the area of ​​the Russian capital since the start of the conflict in 2022.

During the night from Saturday to Sunday, a new “record” attack by 145 Russian drones targeted Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced on X. The Ukrainian Air Force said 62 of these drones had been neutralized.

On the front, Ukrainian troops are becoming exhausted, suffering from their inferiority in weapons and personnel, and retreating in multiple sectors in eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops have been advancing more rapidly in recent weeks.

Furthermore, thousands of North Korean soldiers are, according to kyiv and the West, deployed in the Russian region of Kursk, where the Ukrainian army has controlled a few hundred square kilometers since its surprise operation launched on August 6. kyiv assures that they have already been engaged in combat. The West, however, refuses to authorize kyiv to strike deep into Russian territory with the weapons it supplies and to shoot down Russian missiles targeting Ukrainian cities, for fear of an escalation.

According to the Washington Post, US President-elect Donald Trump spoke last Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin and asked him not to provoke an escalation in Ukraine. A spokesperson for the US president-elect’s transition team said in a statement to AFP that it would not “comment on private calls between President Trump and other leaders”.

Donald Trump, who will return to the White House on January 20, has regularly claimed to be able to end the war in Ukraine “in one day”, without ever detailing how he would do it.