Air raid alerts have been issued across Ukraine in anticipation of more Russian missile strikes just a day after Putin unleashed the biggest barrage since the start of the war – killing 19 civilians and wounding 105.
All bars in Ukrainian regions occupied by Crimea were told to be alert for more attacks early Tuesday amid reports that incoming rockets had been shot down over the capital Kiev and that suicide drones roamed the skies near Odesa.
The city of Zaporizhzhia, close to Russian front lines in the south, continued to be bombed overnight with officials saying schools, hospitals and homes were destroyed.
It came hours after Putin’s bloodthirsty war hawks appeared on state television to hail his new no-holds-barred approach to war, while urging him to go further and bomb Ukraine ‘into a 19th century country’.
Yuri Podolyak, a military analyst speaking on Channel 1, said Russia is ‘easily’ able to maintain the intensity of Monday’s attack throughout the winter – and predicted the consequences for Ukraine would be ‘catastrophic’.
“A red line has been crossed and I think that is now obvious to everyone,” he said.
“All European governments have immediately requested that their embassies be evacuated from Kiev.
‘They realize that this is not just a one-day event, that this will continue and that the winter in Ukraine will be catastrophic.’
Meanwhile, Konstantin Dolgov, Russia’s former human rights commissioner, also urged Putin to continue the bombardment, asking TV viewers: ‘Are they whining yet? Are they howling yet?’
Defense analyst Alexander Artamonov said Western hopes that Russia would run out of missiles would never come true. They will never end.’
The pro-war fanatic insisted: ‘It is of course necessary for strikes to continue in a systematic way, as Ukrainian society is currently, in my opinion, psychiatrically ill. In psychiatry, people are not given weapons.
“Of course they are treated, and of course they must have significant benefits, but anything that can be turned into a weapon, be it a car, a knife, a gun or anything else, must be seized.
“So if bridges are cut and railways are also destroyed, there will be no capacity to deliver troops to the front line.”
Moscow’s barrage of missile strikes on cities across Ukraine sparked celebration from Russian officials and pro-Kremlin experts, who in recent weeks have criticized the Russian military for a series of embarrassing battlefield setbacks.
Commentators and war correspondents praised Monday’s attack as a fitting and long-awaited response to Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive in the northeast and south and a weekend attack on a key bridge between Russia and Crimea.
However, many argued that Moscow needed to continue the intensity of Monday’s missile attacks to win the war now.
“Putin’s initiative is weakening and he is becoming more dependent on circumstances and those who create the ‘victory’ (in Ukraine) for him,” Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of the independent R.Politik think tank, wrote in an online commentary on Monday. .
Putin’s supporters have been calling for drastic steps on the battlefield in Ukraine for weeks. Those calls intensified over the weekend, shortly after an explosion on the Kerch bridge linking Crimea to Russia sent shockwaves around the world.
The bridge, Europe’s longest, is a prominent symbol of Russian military power and was opened by Putin himself in 2018.
‘And?’ Margarita Simonyan, head of state-funded RT television, took to social media to marvel at Moscow’s response to the attack on the bridge.
“This is one of those cases where the country has to show that we can fight back,” wrote Alexander Kots, a war correspondent for Russia’s popular pro-Kremlin tabloid, Komsomolskaya Pravda.
‘Tis time to fight! Harsh, even cruel. Without looking back at any criticism from the West,’ Sergei Mironov, a senior Russian lawmaker who heads the state-backed A Just Russia party, tweeted on Saturday.
“There will be no major sanctions. They will not say worse words. We have to do our thing. We started it – we should go to the end. There is no turning back. Time to answer!’
The response came on Monday morning, when Moscow fired dozens of missiles at Ukrainian cities simultaneously, killing and wounding many and inflicting unprecedented damage on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.
The strikes, which hit 15 Ukrainian cities, most of them regional capitals, knocked out power lines, damaged railway stations and roads and left towns without water supplies.
For the first time in months, Russian missiles exploded in the heart of Kiev, dangerously close to government buildings.
Putin said on Monday the attacks were in retaliation for what he called Kiev’s “terrorist” actions targeting the Kerch bridge, and vowed a “harsh” and “proportionate” response should Ukraine carry out further attacks that threaten Russia’s security.
“Nobody should be in any doubt about that,” he said.
“Here comes the answer,” RT’s Simonyan tweeted Monday after the attacks. ‘The Crimean bridge was the very red line from the beginning.’
The strongman leader of Chechnya, a Russian region in the North Caucasus, Ramzan Kadyrov said he is now ‘100% satisfied’ with how the Kremlin’s ‘special military operation’ is going.
He was among the most ardent advocates of ‘more drastic measures’ in Ukraine, even calling for the use of low-yield nuclear weapons.
The Moscow-appointed governor of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, described the strikes as ‘good news’.
The cheers from Kremlin supporters, however, came with demands for Putin and the Russian military to keep up the pace and intensity of the attacks and the damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure.
Aksyonov emphasized in his statement that “if such actions to destroy the enemy’s infrastructure had been taken every day, then we would have finished everything by May and the Kiev regime would have been defeated.”
‘I hope that now the pace of the operation will not slow down,’ wrote Aksyonov.
RT’s top host Anton Krasovsky, after posting a video of himself dancing on a balcony in a cap with a Z on it, said in another Telegram post that the damage to Ukraine’s power lines ‘wasn’t enough! Not enough!’
Another state television journalist, Andrei Medvedev, called Monday’s attack ‘a logical step that not only society has long demanded – the military situation demanded a different approach to hostilities.’
‘And then it happened. But does it change much?’ Medvedev, who works for Russia’s state TV group VGTRK and has a seat on Moscow’s city council, wrote on Telegram.
“If the strikes on the critical infrastructure become regular, if the strikes on railways, bridges and power plants become part of our tactics, then yes, it changes (the situation).
But so far, according to (official) statements, no decision has been made to throw Ukraine into the Middle Ages,’ wrote Medvedev.
Political analyst Stanovaya noted in a Telegram post on Monday that “strong pressure” has been on Putin “to move to aggressive actions, massive bombings,” and that prompted him to act.
“As of today, you can say that Putin was persuaded to resort to a more aggressive line. And that is consistent with his understanding of the situation. But it’s a slippery slope – there’s no turning back,’ Stanovaya wrote.