As the death toll from Russia’s enormous New Year’s Eve assault across the country rose to at least three, Ukrainians awoke to a bleak 2023 Sunday, reeling from additional sirens and new missile attacks.
Air attack warnings were heard in the capital shortly after midnight, and then a barrage of missiles broke up the tiny celebrations Ukrainians were having at home.
According to Ukrainian officials, Russia is now purposefully targeting people to instill fear and lower morale.
On New Year’s Day, when Kyiv was relatively silent, many people who were up enjoyed brief moments of tranquility.
Evheniya Shulzhenko and her husband were sitting on a seat in a park when they spoke.
They were looking out over the city. “Of course, it was hard to celebrate truly since we knew that our warriors can’t be with their families,” she said.
However, a “very dramatic” New Year’s Eve speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy uplifted her spirits and gave her pride in being Ukrainian, according to Shulzhenko.
After residing in Bakhmut and Kharkiv, two cities that have seen some of the war’s fiercest combat, she recently relocated to Kyiv.
Several explosions shook Ukraine’s capital and other regions on Saturday night into Sunday morning, inflicting numerous injuries.
An AP photographer discovered a woman’s body while her son and husband were standing nearby at the scene of an explosion in Kyiv on Saturday.
According to mayor Vitali Klitschko, two schools, one of which was a kindergarten, were destroyed.
The operations were carried out 36 hours after Russia began massive missile airstrikes against energy infrastructure installations on Thursday.
Ukrainian officials were disturbed by the unusually swift follow-up on Saturday.
While its armed forces struggle to retain territory and expand, Russia has been attacking Ukraine’s power and water sources practically every week since October.
According to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy chief of staff to the president, shelling throughout the night in some areas of the southern city of Kherson resulted in the death of one person and the destruction of hundreds of windows of a children’s hospital.
Following the withdrawal of Russian soldiers over the Dnieper River, which divides the Kherson area, Ukrainian forces took back the city in November.
According to Kherson Governor Yaroslav Yanushevych, doctors were operating on a 13-year-old kid who had been gravely injured in a neighboring village that evening when shells landed at the children’s hospital on Saturday.
The shelling blew out the surgery room’s windows, and the boy was taken in critical condition to a hospital in Mykolaiv, which was 62 miles (99 kilometers) distant.
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