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The large-scale attack Zelenskyy warned of, when he said intelligence pointed to Russia readying missiles for a strike within 48 hours, now appears to have materialised: Russian ballistic missiles killed civilians in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, and a separate combination of Russian attacks has effectively paralysed operations at the ports of Odessa, according to Handelsblatt. Ukrainian officials said a vessel hit by Russian fire a week earlier, in an attack that killed ten people, sank on Sunday, as reported by Reuters and Politika, giving the port campaign a delayed second cost. The anchor of the thread remains the toll of 15 dead in Ukraine at the end of last week: the rare daytime missile strike on a private training ground in the Bucha district of Kyiv region during the "Armada" exhibition of drone manufacturers, which the Prosecutor General put at around 10 dead and close to 100 injured, and the air bombs on Sloviansk that killed five and damaged the building housing Latvia's honorary consulate, drawing a third state into the diplomatic aftermath. Russia's defence ministry said the Kyiv-region strike targeted those launching drones at Russian civilian infrastructure, while Ukrainian prosecutors opened their own inquiry into how the exhibition was organised, and that question is still unresolved.
The exchange continues to run in both directions and deeper into Russian territory. TASS reported that Ukrainian drones wounded twelve people including two minors in Belgorod and hit an apartment building in Rostov-on-Don, along with two killed and fourteen injured in attacks on settlements in the Donetsk area and a strike on an ambulance in Gorlovka that Russian officials called a war crime; all of these accounts come from Russian sources and are not independently confirmed. Nor is the earlier claim by Moscow-installed officials in occupied Zaporizhzhia region that a nighttime attack on a holiday camp area at Kyrylivka on the Sea of Azov killed at least eight to eleven people including children, which the occupation authorities attribute to Ukraine and which remains awaiting an account from Kyiv. Strikes attributed to Ukraine as far as Tyumen, Kirov, Yekaterinburg and the Caspian Sea indicate a reach well beyond the border regions, and Zelenskyy's unconfirmed claim that Russia intends to bring in a further 30,000 North Korean soldiers, with the Voronezh region prepared for them since June, still stands without corroboration here. All of it lands during an unsettled period for Ukraine's military leadership, with protests in Kyiv over the dismissal of the defence minister running into a second week, a crisis that has already cost the former head of the armed forces his post.
Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine continues to be fought in part through long-range missile and drone strikes on Ukrainian territory, with the Kyiv region typically attacked at night. Ukraine has built a large domestic drone-manufacturing sector that supplies its forces and stages industry exhibitions such as "Armada", and it uses these drones against targets inside Russia, which Moscow cites in justifying strikes. Front-line cities in Donetsk region, including Sloviansk, are within range of Russian guided air bombs. Several foreign states maintain consular representation in Ukrainian cities, including Latvia's honorary consulate in Sloviansk, so strikes there can carry diplomatic consequences for EU and NATO members. Ukraine is simultaneously in the middle of a domestic political crisis over the dismissal of its defence minister, which has already led to the removal of the head of the armed forces.
