From the HERE City National Desk
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia pounded Kyiv and the surrounding region with waves of ballistic missiles overnight into Monday, cutting electricity to roughly 550,000 households, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country once more received no advance alert from its partners before the first strikes landed.
Zelenskyy said Russia fired 16 ballistic missiles aimed at energy sites and that 10 of those facilities were hit. At least one person was killed, Ukrainian authorities said. The barrage also included cruise missiles and hundreds of drones; the air force counted 269 Shahed drones and said defenders brought down or jammed 243 of them along with four missiles.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuri Ihnat, said on television Monday that no warning came before the missiles hit Kyiv power plants at about 11 p.m. Sunday. Ukraine did get notice ahead of a second wave around 3 a.m., he said.
For years, U.S. intelligence has given Ukraine a few minutes’ notice of incoming Russian ballistic missiles, enough time to trigger air raid sirens and send people to shelters. Kyiv says those alerts failed to arrive on at least three days during the past week, a gap that has fed suspicion in Ukraine that Washington is holding back to pressure it toward a deal with Moscow.
Zelenskyy tied the missing warnings to wider frustrations, saying it amounts to denying reality when air defense missile supplies are held up while Russia gets sanctions relief. On Friday, President Donald Trump waived a broad Russia sanctions package that both chambers of Congress had passed, telling lawmakers the pause served the national interest. Trump said Sunday he did not want to push Russia away from peace talks and accused Zelenskyy of not wanting the war to end.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, traveling in Uzbekistan, said Monday he could not say exactly what happened overnight but pointed to a software problem with the early warning system a few nights earlier. U.S. officials had not raised a software issue before. Rubio said the U.S. military’s European Command is reviewing the attacks, and he denied Zelenskyy’s claim from Sunday that Washington had paused some intelligence sharing.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it struck a Ukrainian data center, a depot holding missiles, a logistics site for drone and cruise missile parts and a drone factory, and that it also hit a cargo ship in the Black Sea about 80 miles from Odesa. Ukraine did not confirm those targets. City officials in Kyiv said a medical facility and a metro station were damaged.
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