KIEV, Ukraine — Russia unleashed another rocket barrage on cities across Ukraine before dawn on Thursday, killing at least one person and hitting critical infrastructure, hours after several Russian balloons, which Ukrainian officials described as a diversionary tactic, were spotted when they floated from the north to Kiev.
It was the third time in the past week that the Ukrainian Air Force had sighted the small inflatable rubber planes, as they are called by the military. The balloons were mostly shot out of the sky as Russian ships and bombers fired dozens of cruise missiles at central and western Ukraine.
The significance of the interaction between the rockets and the balloons was not immediately clear. But as Moscow’s armed forces fight to launch another ground offensivethe rocket attacks combined with the use of balloons showed that Russia continues to look for ways to terrorize Ukraine from the skies and outwit its air defenses.
“The occupiers have slightly changed their tactics,” Andriy Yermak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a statement.
While the cheap balloons are an old Russian tactic being revived, the Ukrainian military says the most serious threat remains the powerful missiles Moscow still possesses. A 79-year-old woman was killed in Thursday’s attacks, although the national energy company said the attacks appeared to have had minimal impact on Ukraine’s power grid.
For months, Russia has been directing waves of missiles at critical infrastructure and other targets across Ukraine in a bid to crush the nation’s morale. When Ukraine’s western allies sent more sophisticated air defense systems to help Kiev protect itself, Moscow turned to using Iranian-made attack drones. The Ukrainians have also adapted and learned to shoot the drones out of the sky without exhausting more expensive missile defense systems.
The balloons appear in Russia’s latest adaptation, although given the war they seemed a little less mysterious than about a Chinese balloon and other objects recently discovered drifting across North America.
Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force, said a Russian balloon in the skies over Dnipro on Sunday marked the first time such a device had been spotted in the years-long war.
“The enemy is trying to troll us, distract our attention and make us use air defense resources,” he said in an interview on Thursday. Every time Ukraine spots a balloon, it must decide whether launching it poses a risk to those on the ground and is worth the ammunition expense.
The problem is that the balloons could be used for multiple purposes, he said. They can carry radar reflectors designed to counter missile defense systems, surveillance equipment to detect Ukrainian positions, even small bombs. They could also be used to try to uncover the location of Ukrainian air defense systems, military analysts said.
The appearance of balloons in the Ukrainian skies comes as top government officials are stepping up warnings that Russia is preparing for another full-scale missile attack to coincide with the anniversary of its full-scale invasion on February 24.
“They are preparing and will try to make another attempt to launch a massive attack,” Oleksii Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Defense Council, said on national television. “We have to keep calm, and we are ready to do that.”
In Thursday’s attack, Mr Ihnat said Russia deployed a variety of missiles to attack Ukraine overnight, including giant Soviet missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads.
“We don’t have the resources to shoot them down, and that’s why missiles like this get to their targets,” he said. “Several critical infrastructure objects were hit,” he said, including an oil processing plant in Kremenchuk in central Ukraine.
Mr Zelensky told Norway’s parliament on Thursday that about half of the more than 30 missiles had penetrated Ukraine’s anti-missile defense system.
Mr Ihnat said the attacks underscored the need to increase the country’s air defense capacity to enable it to shoot down high-velocity and ballistic missiles.
Anna Lukinova And Victoria Kim contributed reporting.
