Russia hits Ukraine's biggest cities with deadly missile attack as Moscow blames U.S. for diplomatic deadlock
More than 40 Russian missiles slammed into Ukraine's two largest cities Tuesday morning, killing at least seven people and leaving 60 more wounded, according to Ukrainian officials, as Moscow again dismissed any diplomatic resolution to the two-year war backed by Kyiv and its Western supporters. The Russian missiles targeted Ukraine's capital Kyiv and Kharkiv, damaging about 30 residential buildings in the latter and shattering around 1,000 apartment windows, leaving residents exposed to frigid winter weather, regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said.
Mayor Ihor Terekhov of Kharkiv, which is only about 18 miles from the eastern border with Russia, was quoted by the French news agency AFP as saying an entire section of a multi-floor apartment building was toppled and an unknown number of people left trapped under the rubble.
The onslaught killed six people and injured 48, including four minors, in Kharkiv, according to Syniehubov. Russia used S-300, Kh-32 and hypersonic Iskander missiles in the attack, he said.
The attack injured at least 20 people in four districts of Kyiv, including a 13-year-old boy, according to Mayor Vitalii Klitschko. A missile also killed a 43-year-old woman and damaged two schools and eight high-rise buildings in Pavlohrad, an industrial city in the eastern Dnipro region, the country's presidential office said.
Russia's Ministry of Defense claimed the strikes carried out Tuesday had hit Ukrainian military production facilities, and that all intended targets had been struck successfully.
The latest missile strikes came after months of grueling trench and artillery warfare along the nearly 1,000-mile front line that stretches from the northern to the southern border of eastern Ukraine. They also came a day after Russian officials said Ukrainian drones had struck an oil storage facility in the Russian region of Bryansk, about 40 miles from the border, causing a massive blaze.
The front line has barely moved in a year, and both sides' inability to dislodge the other has been matched by their unwillingness to budge on their key negotiating points.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, a veteran diplomat close to President Vladimir Putin, again rejected on Monday any negotiations for a truce within the parameters put forward by Ukraine at the U.N., backed by the U.S., which include a full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory and a cessation of hostilities.
Lavrov blames U.S. for diplomatic deadlock
Lavrov, in New York for U.N. meetings on Ukraine and the Middle East, in an exclusive interview with CBS News on Monday, reiterated Moscow's long-standing claim that it is the U.S. and its close allies that are preventing a resolution to the war Russia started with its Feb. 24, 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
"The current administration is not interested in having any dialogue, except from time to time on issues of the detainees, exchanges, functioning of the two embassies in Washington and in Moscow and the mission in New York, but not on any policy matters," insisted Lavrov. He complained that Russia was being treated unfairly by Washington and said if the U.S. would halt what he called its "policy of using Ukraine as an instrument of war against Russia, we would be ready to listen."
Lavrov repeated Moscow's frequent claim that the U.S. government "demonizes Russia" and, asked why more than 140 nations voted in the U.N. General Assembly to condemn Russia for violating Ukrainian sovereignty with its ongoing 2022 invasion, Lavrov said all the countries that voted against Russia were pressured "by the U.S., the Brits, and some Europeans."
During Monday's Security Council meeting on Ukraine, Kyiv's Ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, told delegates his country's security was "an integral part of world and regional security," calling Russia's invasion one of the primary "destabilizing factors for security in the world."
U.S. deputy U.N. Ambassador Robert Wood said it was Putin's "single-minded pursuit of the obliteration of Ukraine and subjugation of its people that is prolonging" the war.