Russia unleashed its ‘unstoppable’ Kinzhal hypersonic missiles for the first time in Ukraine, the defence ministry said today, destroying a weapons storage site in the country’s west on Friday.
Russia has never before admitted using the high-precision weapon in combat, and state news agency RIA Novosti said it was the first use of the Kinzhal hypersonic weapons during the conflict in pro-Western Ukraine.
Moscow claims the ‘Kinzhal’- or Dagger – is ‘unstoppable’ by current Western weapons. The missile, which has a range of 1,250 miles, is nuclear capable. This was a conventional strike.
‘The Kinzhal aviation missile system with hypersonic aeroballistic missiles destroyed a large underground warehouse containing missiles and aviation ammunition in the village of Deliatyn in the Ivano-Frankivsk region’, the Russian defence ministry said Saturday.
Russian Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov also said that the Russian forces used the anti-ship missile system Bastion to strike Ukrainian military facilities near the Black Sea port of Odesa.
Aerial footage released by the Russian military claimed to show the missile strike. Large, long buildings are shown in the footage in a snowy region, before one is obliterated by a huge explosion – sending flames, earth and debris high into the air. People can be seen on the ground fleeing as smoke pours from the site.
Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuri Ignat confirmed that a storage site had been targeted, but added that Kyiv had no information regarding the type of missile that was used.
‘The enemy targeted our depots’ but ‘we have no information of the type of missile,’ he said. ‘There has been damage, destruction and the detonation of munitions. They are using all the missiles in their arsenal against us.’
Russia reportedly first used the weapon during its military campaign in Syria in 2016 to support the Assad regime, although it was unclear if this was the same model. Some of the most intense bombing came in 2016 during the battle for Aleppo, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has termed the missile ‘an ideal weapon’ that flies at 10 times the speed of sound and can overcome air-defence systems.
Deliatyn, a picturesque village in the foothills of the picturesque Carpathian mountains, is located outside the city of Ivano-Frankivsk. The region of Ivano-Frankivsk shares a 30-mile long border with NATO member Romania.
Since Putin’s invasion on February 24, most of the fighting has taken place in Ukraine’s east – closer to Russia – as Moscow’s forces struggle to make significant gains further into the country.
However, in recent days there have been signs of more western strikes, with one person being killed overnight in a missile attack near Lviv, the closest strike yet to the centre of the western city – where thousands have fled to.
The strike comes as Ukraine’s forces continue to put up a fierce resistance against the invading armies, which have been forced to resort to seemingly indiscriminate artillery strikes on population centres.
Moscow’s troops have been stalled for days. Kyiv has claimed the invaders have suffered almost 15,000 casualties.
American sources estimate the number is lower, saying that 7,000 Russian troops have died so far in the fighting, including four major generals and a number of other senior officers.
Reports on Saturday said that a fifth Russian general had been killed.
The statement did not say where he was killed but other accounts claimed it was in the village of Chornobaivka, Kherson Region. This was attributed to Vadym Denysenko, advisor to the Ukrainian Internal Affairs Minister.
The Ukrainians also claimed that wounded Russian soldiers have filled all hospital facilities in Gomel city in Belarus.
‘All health institutions with surgical departments are involved in the admission and treatment of the wounded occupiers,’ said the Ukrainian general staff.
‘Surgeons are working around the clock.All scheduled operations of Belarusian citizens are either cancelled or postponed indefinitely. A high death rate is recorded among the severely wounded Russian invaders.’
Overnight, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces are blockading his country’s largest cities to wear the population down into submission, but he warned Saturday that the strategy will fail and Moscow will lose in the long run if it doesn’t end its war.
Zelenskyy accused the Kremlin of deliberately creating ‘a humanitarian catastrophe ‘ and appealed for Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with him, using a huge Moscow stadium rally where Putin lavished praise on Russian forces Friday to illustrate what was at stake.
‘Just picture for yourself that in that stadium in Moscow there are 14,000 dead bodies and tens of thousands more injured and maimed. Those are the Russian costs throughout the invasion,’ Zelenskyy said in a nightly video address to the nation recorded outside the presidential office in Kyiv.
The rally took place as Russia has faced heavier-than-expected losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home. The event was surrounded by suspicions it was a Kremlin-manufactured display of patriotism. Russian police have detained thousands of people from protests of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Fighting continued on multiple fronts in Ukraine. In the besieged port city of Mariupol, the site of some of the war’s greatest suffering.
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said the country hopes to evacuate civilians on Saturday via ten humanitarian corridors from cities and towns on the front line of fighting with Russian forces.
She said a corridor had been agreed for the besieged city of Mariupol, although the authorities’ previous efforts to evacuate civilians there under a temporary ceasefire have mostly failed, with both sides trading blame.
Meanwhile, more than 1,300 people – including women and babies – are still feared trapped in the bombed ruins of a theatre in the besieged city of Mariupol as rescue efforts continue to be hampered by constant Russian shelling.
The helpless casualties were yesterday forced to spend a third night entombed in the basement of the destroyed Drama Theatre which was hit by Putin’s forces on Wednesday.
Their prospects of survival are growing bleaker by the day, with no supplies and Russian troops firing at rescuers trying to dig through the rubble.
Last night a local MP said those inside were forced to dig from within the wreckage because rescue attempts had been thwarted by ongoing airstrikes.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who branded Russia’s attack as ‘outright terror’, last night vowed to continue the rescue mission.
‘Hundreds of Mariupol residents are still under the debris. Despite the shelling, despite all the difficulties, we will continue the rescue work,’ he said.
Russian troops have now reached the city centre and civilians remain hiding in bunkers while fighters battle on the streets.
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said: ‘Tanks and machine gun battles continue. There’s no city centre left. There isn’t a small piece of land in the city that doesn’t have signs of war.’
The devastating losses across Ukraine have sparked a poignant protest in Lviv, where 109 empty prams were arranged in solemn rows to mark the number of children killed since Russia invaded.
Local authorities said more than 130 survivors have emerged from the rubble of the Mariupol theatre which was being used as the ravaged port city’s biggest civilian bomb shelter.
But they said that those saved represented just one tenth of the civilians still trapped within the refuge which miraculously withstood the blast.
Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova said: ‘According to our data there are still more than 1,300 people there who are in these basements, in that bomb shelter. We pray that they will be alive but so far there is no information about them.’
Former governor MP Serhiy Taruta said he fears many survivors will die because the city’s emergency services have been destroyed by Russian troops.
‘Services that are supposed to help are demolished, rescue and utility services are physically destroyed. This means that all the survivors of the bombing will either die under the ruins of the theatre, or have already died,’ he wrote on Facebook.
He said those trapped had been left to dig their way out of the collapsed three-storey building.
‘People are doing everything themselves. My friends went to help but due to constant shelling it was not safe.’
However Mariupol MP Dmytro Gurin insisted that while the rescue mission had been hampered by constant Russian attacks, efforts were still under way.
One woman said the strike had taken place while those sheltering beneath the theatre were cooking and only around 100 had time to flee.
Nick Osychenko, the CEO of a Mariupol TV station, said as he fled the city with six members of his family, aged between 4 and 61, he saw dead bodies on nearly every block.
‘We were careful and didn’t want the children to see the bodies, so we tried to shield their eyes,’ he said. ‘We were nervous the whole journey. It was frightening, just frightening.’
