JAKARTA - Russia fired cruise missiles at cities across Ukraine during peak hours on Monday morning, killing civilians, causing power cuts and heat, in what President Vladimir Putin declared in retaliation for Ukraine's attacks, including on bridges to Crimea.
The missiles hit a busy intersection, parks and tourist sites in the central city of Kyiv with intensity invisible, even as Russian troops sought to seize the capital at the start of the war.
Explosions were also reported to have occurred in Lviv, Ternopil and Zhytomyr in western Ukraine, Dnipro, and Kremenchuk in central Ukraine, Zaporizhia in the south and Kharkiv in the east.
In the middle of the morning, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said Russia had fired 81 cruise missiles, and Ukraine's air defenses had shot down 43 of them. Police said at least five people were killed and 12 injured in Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said attacks during peak hours Monday were deliberately carried out to kill people, as well as to cripple Ukraine's power grids.
"They are trying to destroy us and remove us from the face of the earth," President Zelensky said in a Telegram messaging app.
President Zelensky then filmed an empty video message on a mobile phone on the city center road Kyiv. He said the attack had two main targets: energy and human infrastructure.
"Times and targets like that are specifically chosen to cause as much damage as possible," he said.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said 11 main infrastructure targets were hit in eight areas, leaving the country's plots without electricity, water, or heat.
He promised to restore utilities as quickly as possible. Officials reported that power outages in Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv and nearby Poltava.
"Putin's only tactic is terror in the peaceful cities of Ukraine, but he will not destroy Ukraine. It will also respond to all the helpers who want to talk to him about peace: Putin is a terrorist who talks to missiles," Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
As previously reported, the only bridge over the Kerch Strait connecting Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, which Moscow exported in 2014, with Russia exploding last Saturday.
In response, in a televised address, President Putin said he had ordered a "massive" long-range attack on Ukraine's energy, command and communications targets, using missiles fired from the air, sea, and land.
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