Russian planes dropped eight powerful glide bombs in the span of 90 minutes on residential districts of the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing one person and wounding dozens of others, regional chief Ivan Fedorov said on Monday.
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Russia has used glide bombs to smash Ukrainian towns and cities since it launched the full-scale invasion of its neighbour more than four years ago.
The weapons are Soviet-era bombs retrofitted with guidance systems and can carry up to 3,000 kilograms of explosives, leaving huge craters. Ukraine has no effective countermeasures against them.
Meanwhile, six people were killed by Ukrainian drone debris in Arkhipo-Osipovka, a small town on Russia’s Black Sea coast in the Krasnodar region, regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev said, adding that 40 others were wounded.
Also, three people were killed and two were wounded in Kyiv’s overnight attack on the illegally annexed Crimea, said the peninsula’s Russian-installed head, Sergei Aksyonov. He gave no details.
Neither side’s claims could be independently verified.
Russia attacked Ukraine with 181 long-range strike drones overnight from Sunday to Monday, according to the Ukrainian air force.
It said air defences jammed and intercepted 163 drones, but 14 caused damage at 13 locations.
The Russian Defence Ministry said its forces struck four bulk carriers carrying cargo for the Ukrainian armed forces, including three in waters of the Black Sea and one in the port of Mykolaiv, but provided no further information.
Russian glide bombs are hard to stop
The Sunday evening onslaught on Zaporizhzhia killed a 71-year-old woman and wounded 31 people, including a 16-year-old girl, as the glide bombs damaged 22 apartment buildings in four districts of the city, Fedorov said.
While Moscow’s forces have captured the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and hold other parts of the region, its capital city of the same name remains in Ukrainian hands.
It is one of the four regions, also including Donetsk, Kherson and Luhansk, that Russia illegally annexed in September 2022 even though its forces do not completely control them.
Other large-scale damage of civilian areas of Ukraine has resulted from Russian ballistic missiles, and late on Sunday President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made another urgent plea for countries to send Ukraine more US-made Patriot air defence systems.
Only Patriot interceptors can reliably stop ballistic missiles, but they are in short supply due to the Iran war.
“The world has Patriot missiles. What matters now is for our partners to make the political decision to provide the necessary packages,” Zelenskyy said on social media.
“The United States knows what we need. Europe knows what we need. Anti-ballistic missiles must protect people, not sit in stockpiles.”
Last week, US President Donald Trump appeared to back off from his earlier commitment to give Ukraine a license to make Patriots itself. He said on Friday that the licensing matter is still under discussion and he hasn’t made a final decision.
Zelenskyy has suggested an alternative to Trump whereby Elon Musk allows Ukraine to use Starlink satellites to target ballistic missile launch sites inside Russia. Officials haven’t publicly said whether that is being considered.
Books burned
Meanwhile, a Russian strike on a warehouse in northeastern Kharkiv over the weekend destroyed 8 million books, the publishing house said on Monday, slamming it as an attack on Ukrainian culture.
It is not the first time Russia has struck a major publishing centre, drawing accusations from Kyiv that Moscow was specifically targeting them.
“This is the largest loss to Ukraine’s book infrastructure since the beginning of the full-scale war” in 2022, the publisher, Ranok, said.
“The blaze is still raging. The enemy is trying to burn out our education and culture,” it added.
The publisher’s director Viktor Kruglov called it an “attack on Ukrainian education and culture.”
A strike on a warehouse near Kyiv last month burnt 800,000 books to ash, the publisher, whose portfolio includes works by George Orwell and Barack Obama, said.
Throughout its invasion, Russia has frequently hit Ukrainian museums, galleries, film studios, churches and other sites of cultural importance.
