Russia’s ‘double-tap missile and drone strikes’ are a nightly nightmare for Ukraine’s citizens as cross-border violence explodes between the two bitter enemies and in the countdown to possible ceasefire
Russian troops launched a ‘double-tap’ explosive drone onslaught on a Ukrainian hospital on Friday, setting off a deadly 1,500 square yard inferno on its roof.
The war-crime attack on civilian patients failed to kill anyone as everybody had been escorted into shelters moments before two drones hit, 40 minutes apart. It happened in the early hours of Friday and destroyed a hospital in the village of Zolochiv, Kharkiv region, leaving a 33 year-old medic injured. The attack happened as UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer prepared to meet allies for his ‘coalition of the willing’ diplomacy task force to solve the Ukraine crisis on Saturday.
Both Ukraine and Russia are exchanging brutal cross-border missile and drone exchanges in as world leaders try to persuade them to agree to an end to the war. Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration, said: “The drone strike ignited the roof. Forty minutes later, Russia launched a second attack with two more drones.” The attack came as ferocious fighting is underway in Kursk inside the Russian border with Moscow’s troops trying to force Ukrainian forces back to their homeland.
On Thursday Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed his military is ‘ in full control of the fighting’ and warned Ukraine’s troops to ‘surrender or die.’ He claimed they are being surrounded and hunted down inside Russia, putting a huge public relations spin on the battles on the ground. And inside Russia increasingly Putin’s population is having the war taken directly to them by Ukraine in every day operations to hit targets.
Some explosions this week have come too close for comfort for the Russian leader who has tried to cover-up the extent of Russian casualties in the war. It is believed hundreds of thousands of Russian men have been killed in the fighting and many more have suffered life-changing injuries. Putin’s recruiters are so short-staffed they have even been forced to trawl Russia’s prisons for thieves, murderers, even rapists to sign up to fight in the war in exchange for their eventual freedom.
Ukraine boasted on Friday it had dropped a drone “virtually in front of Putin’s nose – 1,312 feet from his route from Novo-Ogaryovo -his official residence outside Moscow- to the Kremlin.” The claim was not attributed to a named official but was leaked by Kyiv’s SBU secret service. Other SBU secret service drones hit “a missile depot for the S-300/S-400 air defence systems on Russian territory”, reported pro-Volodymyr Zelensky Telegram channel Pravda Gerashchenko.
The rare drone strikes penetrating Moscow’s defences were “ less than 400 meters from Kutuzovsky Prospekt, one and a quarter miles from the Russian Foreign Ministry building, and two and a half miles from the Kremlin,” according to a statement. Early in the war, Ukraine claimed to have hit the Kremlin with a strike.