Russia-Ukraine War: Putin Unleashes Barrage of Missiles on Ukrainian Civilian Areas (Published 2022) (2024)

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Here is the latest on Russia’s attacks across Ukraine.

Denouncing the bombing of the Kremlin-built bridge, an embarrassing blow, as a “terrorist attack,” Mr. Putin threatened more strikes if Ukraine hit Russian targets again.

“No one should have any doubt about it,” he said.

The attacks changed little or nothing on the battlefield, where Russia has been losing ground for weeks, but they left neighborhoods across Ukraine battered and bloodied.

Buildings toppled, windows blew out, and blazes erupted. Civilians making their morning commute rushed to whatever shelter they could find as sirens blared warnings of incoming cruise missiles and so-called kamikaze drones. At least 14 people were killed and 89 wounded, the Ukrainian authorities said, while power and water were knocked out in numerous cities.

“There is no safe place,” said one Ukrainian in Kyiv, Alla Rohatniova, 48, who had fled to the capital after her home in the Kharkiv region was destroyed, only to find herself once more under attack. “Right now, we don’t know where they will strike. It could be anywhere.”

The targeting of civilian areas drew condemnations from leaders across the West.

“Shocked and appalled by the vicious attacks on Ukrainian cities,” said the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. “Putin’s Russia has again shown the world what it stands for: brutality and terror.”

President Biden said, “These attacks only further reinforce our commitment to stand with the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

Even countries that have generally avoided expressing any criticisms of the Kremlin since Russian troops poured across their neighbor’s border on Feb. 24 spoke out.

“All countries deserve respect for their sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry. In New Delhi, an official said, “India is deeply concerned at the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine.”

Russia has repeatedly insisted that it has limited its attacks to military targets, but there was no evidence of that on Monday as more than 80 cruise missiles and 24 self-destructing drones wreaked havoc as they exploded in cities in nearly every corner of the country.

“With all these strikes across all the territory of Ukraine, they did not hit one military target, only civilian ones,” an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovych, said in an interview.

Ukrainian officials said they had been able to intercept several of the rockets, but many more slipped through.

“We have to repel these attacks using Soviet-era weapons, which we possess an insufficient quantity of,” Ukraine’s top general, Valeriy Zaluzhny, said on Twitter.

Mr. Zelensky said that in a phone call with Mr. Biden on the eve of a Group of 7 virtual meeting, he had urged the American president to provide Ukraine with more advanced air-defense systems.

Despite all the missiles that found their targets, experts agreed that what did not appear seriously damaged in the attacks was the Ukrainian military’s ability to wage war. For weeks, it has been retaking occupied towns, one after another.

Indeed, Russia’s assault on Monday may end up backfiring, said Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst with Rochan Consulting.

“I don’t think they will have a strategic impact,” he said, “unless we’re talking about increasing morale on the Ukrainian side and maybe speeding up some deliveries of military equipment from the West.”

If Ukraine’s soldiers were spared, its civilians were not. Strikes hit from Lviv in the west to Mykolaiv in the south and to Kharkiv in the northeast. In Kyiv, Russian ordnance struck a playground, museums and a popular pedestrian bridge in the center of the city.

But over the course of the day, the purpose of the attacks seemed to grow clearer: Moscow was intent on knocking out critical infrastructure, depriving Ukrainians of light and heat as winter approached.

By Monday afternoon, four regions — Lviv, Poltava, Sumy and Kharkiv — were without electricity, officials said. In Kharkiv, electrically powered trolleys, buses and trams glided to a stop. Electric trains headed west from Kyiv never made it out of the station. In all, 11 infrastructure sites were reported to be hit.

“Today, the enemy is testing us,” said Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv. “The aggressor takes out his anger on the civilian population.”

Ukrainian officials said they would resort to rolling blackouts to avoid overloading backup electrical lines, and warned citizens to brace themselves for outages.

By Monday evening, electricity was reconnected to most of Kharkiv, the State Emergency Service announced in a Facebook post. Power had also been mostly restored in Lviv, and all residents should expect to have water by morning, Andriy Sadovyi, the city’s mayor, said in a Twitter post.

Most of the targets, said Mr. Arestovych, the Zelensky adviser, were infrastructure responsible for providing heat and electricity to civilians. Ukraine’s military, he said, will not be affected. “They do not count on the regular power grids,” he said. “They have their generators, their own means of producing electricity.”

The tactic of trying to freeze Ukrainians into submission is not new. The Kremlin has for years studied Ukraine’s energy networks and has sought to manipulate prices or cut natural gas deliveries to influence politics. Twice before, Russia has cut natural gas supplies to Ukraine in midwinter.

Now, it is pursuing the same goal with bombs.

The approach may be unlikely to force Ukrainians to the bargaining table, experts said.

“Bombardment is very weak efficacy, and typically only builds resolve,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at C.N.A., a defense research institute based in Virginia.

But as Russian forces struggle on the battlefield, such strikes on infrastructure targets may allow the Kremlin to extend the war indefinitely by squeezing the Ukrainian economy and quashing any hope of a return to normalcy, a hope raised by Ukraine’s recent military successes.

Mr. Putin is also fighting a war on two fronts, and only one of them is in Ukraine. The other is in Moscow, where he has faced unusually vocal criticism from pro-war Russians who argue that he should be hitting Ukraine much harder. That may also help explain the many civilian targets hit on Monday.

In the Russian capital, however, there appeared to be little awareness on Monday morning about what had happened. In one chic neighborhood, people soaked up the sun, while elsewhere, many Muscovites were getting on with their lives, rushing to work or appointments.

Most people who were asked by a reporter for The New York Times for a reaction to the strikes said they had not followed the news. Those who did know about the strikes seemed unperturbed.

Vladimir, a 37-year-old army veteran who works in construction, cheered the latest destruction in Ukraine, calling it “just a little warning shot,” and said he hoped more would follow. But Russia’s real enemy, he said, was the United States.

“It is important to strike not Ukraine — because it is a dependent country that isn’t guilty of very much — but directly on America,” he said, echoing Mr. Putin’s claims. “Because America is in charge of everything and is destroying everything.”

But on Tuesday, Ukraine was struck, over and over.

In Kyiv, a target of Mr. Putin’s invasion in the early days, many had grown relaxed as the combat moved to the east and south of Ukraine. Weeds had begun to sprout from the sandbags used to protect monuments and statues in the capital from blasts. As recently as Saturday night, young people had crowded bars, many of them toasting the earlier bridge attack that had so enraged the Kremlin.

Then, the air-raid sirens started sounding.

Michael Schwirtz reported from Kyiv, Ukraine; Andrew E. Kramer from Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine; Megan Specia from Kyiv; and Eric Nagourney from New York. Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting from Moscow, and Eric Schmidt and Michael D. Shear from Washington.

The U.N. General Assembly debates a resolution condemning Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian provinces.

Though the meeting was scheduled before the strikes, many countries took the opportunity to speak out about the attacks, the worst aerial bombardment since the early days of the war. At least 14 people were killed and much of Ukraine was plunged into a blackout.

The group is debating a proposed response to Russia’s annexations of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in September, which followed staged referendums that world leaders have described as illegal shams and a violation of the U.N. charter. (Russia’s military does not actually control thousands of square miles of the supposedly annexed territory.)

Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the General Assembly, delivered passionate remarks to the council condemning Russia’s strikes on Monday. “A trail of blood is left behind the Russian delegation when it enters the General Assembly,” he said, “and the hall is filled up with the smell of smoldering human flesh.”

Mr. Kyslytsya said the rules of the United Nations Charter require that U.N. member states refrain from the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” He pressed the group to come down hard on Russia for its acts of aggression, to maintain the credibility of the U.N. If the institution’s authority is eroded, he said, “it will ultimately fall in failure.”

Csaba Korosi, a Hungarian diplomat serving as the session’s president, also pointed to the U.N. charter as he urged Ukraine and Russia to reach a diplomatic solution to end the brutal, seven-month-old war. “The U.N. charter is clear,” he said. “The General Assembly has been clear. The Secretary General has been clear. Aggression is illegal.”

Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s ambassador to the U.N., defended the Kremlin-orchestrated referendums, claiming that the votes reflected the will of the people and that the annexations took place only to protect Ukrainian citizens, especially those of Russian heritage, who Moscow claims have been oppressed by the Kyiv government.

The General Assembly will vote later this week on the draft resolution.

Protests erupt in European cities to condemn Russia’s strikes.

Hundreds gathered in the Czech Republic’s capital, Prague, bearing flags and banners.

“We need modern air defense systems,” read one handwritten sign. Other demonstrators wrapped themselves in the Ukrainian flag and carried crosses painted in its colors and labeled with the names of Ukrainian cities.

In Poland, scores turned out in Krakow to show solidarity with Ukraine, packing into the city’s main square. Outside the Russian embassy in Warsaw, protesters lit yellow and blue flares — Ukraine’s colors — and unfurled a giant Ukrainian flag.

Protests were also reported outside the Russian Embassy in Rome; in Vienna; in Cologne, Germany; in Tbilisi, Georgia; and in Bucharest, Romania.

The Russian missile barrage will most likely pressure the West to give Ukraine more air-defense systems, analysts say.

But Ukrainian defenses cannot stop all incoming Russia attacks, and Kyiv has repeatedly requested more advanced systems to protect cities and civilian infrastructure.

The Pentagon said late last month that it would deliver two National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System to Ukraine within the next two months. Six more of the systems are “longer-term” deliveries, the Defense Department has said.

On Monday, Pentagon officials declined to specify when the NASAMS would arrive on the battlefield. “We’re not going to provide a timetable for public consumption that could potentially be used by the Russians to allow them advance notice of any particular capability they might face,” J. Todd Breasseale, a Defense Department spokesman, said.

The United States has used NASAMS to help protect the White House and other parts of the Washington Capitol area since 2005, according to Raytheon, which jointly produces the system with a Norwegian partner.

Norway also is expected to send a small number of NASAMS to Ukraine soon, U.S. officials said.

But President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials have asked for even more advanced air defenses.

“I thank the president and Congress, and both parties that the decision has been made to give Ukraine NASAMs,” Mr. Zelensky said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” last month. “It’s air defense, but it won’t be nearly enough in order to protect schools, universities, education infrastructure, hospitals and medical infrastructure and to protect homes of Ukrainians.”

Mr. Zelensky said in a Twitter message that he had reiterated that message to President Biden in a telephone call on Monday. “Air defense is currently the number 1 priority in our defense cooperation,” he wrote.

For his part, Mr. Biden “pledged to continue providing Ukraine with the support needed to defend itself, including advanced air defense systems,” the White House said in a statement about the call.

Ukraine’s top general, Valeriy Zaluzhny, said on Monday evening that Russia had used a variety of weapons in the strikes: air-, sea- and land-based missiles; ballistic missiles; surface-to-air missiles; and reconnaissance and attack drones, including Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones.”

“We have to repel these attacks using Soviet-era weapons which we possess an insufficient quantity of,” he wrote on Twitter.

All told, Russia fired about 75 to 80 missiles from launch sites and air space inside Russia and other places, possibly including Belarus, according to preliminary assessments from military analysts studying the attacks. The Ukrainian military put the number at 84.

The wave of strikes hit what appeared to be many random targets despite the Kremlin’s insistence that the attacks were focused on strategic sites.

“Throughout the war, the Russian military has had problems with target selection and the accuracy of their missiles,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CNA, a defense research institute in Arlington, Va. “As the war goes on, their supply of precision-guided weapons has been dwindled, and they are using weapons that are not suited to land targets or that are old and unreliable.”

Mr. Kofman continued: “This has resulted in strikes that sometimes hit Ukrainian critical infrastructure, others that appear to have widely missed their targets and some that appeared to be aimed at civilian areas.”

Kharkiv switches to a familiar war footing as a new wave of missile strikes knocks out power.

Cars lined up at gas stations to fill up while they could, and residents lined up at stores to fill drums with drinking water.

Three explosions were heard over the city midmorning but the worst damage occurred when a fourth missile hit an electricity station outside the city, officials said. Internet providers announced interruptions in service as they sought alternative sources of power.

By 6 p.m., electricity was reconnected to most of Kharkiv, the State Emergency Service announced in a Facebook post. One district remained without power but emergency generators were in use for critical facilities.

The head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, Oleh Syniehubov, said in a statement on Telegram that fixing the water supply would take longer.

“The danger has not yet passed — I ask everyone to stay in shelters,” he said in an afternoon message.

Vladyslav Pyvovar, 20, still opened up his bar, the Typsy Cherry, for business.

“I woke up, got dressed, came here and only then realized that there was no electricity anywhere,” he said. “There’s nothing to do at home. Here at least I can do some good, serving drinks to people.”

Known for its cherry liqueur, the bar served about 50 customers on Monday, he said.

“The mood was cheerful,” he said. “People drank, had fun, and wondered when the electricity will resume.”

Mr. Pyvovar had closed the Typsy Cherry and fled the city in March after the bar was hit in a bombardment as Kharkiv came under concerted attack from Russian ground forces. But by May the Ukrainian Army had pushed Russian troops back from the city’s edge, so Mr. Pyvovar returned. He reopened the bar in June.

Many other residents had returned, too. But by Monday evening the streets of Kharkiv were largely deserted. The lone bright spot among the dark buildings was the office of Nova Poshta, Ukraine’s foremost courier service.

Some traffic lights were also working again. The regional energy company said it was using backup supplies but asked residents to restrict their electricity consumption.

The Typsy Cherry was open, but inside it was dark and almost empty.

Tetiana Osypenko, 60, was on the street waiting for a taxi home. A saleswoman at a store in a subway underpass, she said she had opened her kiosk early in the morning but heard three explosions at around 10 a.m. Then the electricity went off. She took shelter in a subway, which had been shut down.

“Even underground, we could still hear explosions,” she said. “The mood is grim. We didn’t earn anything today and now I have to take a taxi home. It was a bad day today, but there were worse.”

With the subway not running, the only public transportation available was city buses. Rushing out of a bus in central Kharkiv, Denys, 19, barely paused for a comment.

“It’s messed up,” he said. “The electricity went out in our district; there is no water. Scary. But this has already happened several times. We’ll survive.”

By hitting power lines and waterworks as winter looms, Russia seeks to sow panic, military experts say.

The idea of freezing Ukrainians into submission is not new. The Kremlin has for years studied Ukraine’s energy networks and sought to manipulate prices or cut natural gas deliveries to influence politics in the country, an approach it is now pursuing with military force. Twice in past years, Russia cut natural gas supplies to Ukraine in midwinter.

By Monday afternoon, bombardments had hit 11 infrastructure sites throughout the country, the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said in a post on Facebook. Ukraine should brace for blackouts and disruptions in water supplies, he said.

Regional officials have been bracing for extensive repair jobs at power plants, hiring extra linemen and setting up communal spaces heated by wood or coal stoves as a fallback option if Russia succeeds in knocking out heat and power in the cold winter months.

“As Russians lose, they fire rockets at civilian infrastructure to create panic in the rear and damage our army,” said Oleksandr Vilkul, the military governor of Kryvyi Rih, a central Ukrainian city that was among the first targets of the Russian strategy of attacking infrastructure last month. In that flurry of strikes, missiles hit the city’s waterworks, water pipes and a sluice on a dam, flooding low-lying neighborhoods.

The strikes on Monday expanded the strategy. By afternoon on Monday, four regions — Lviv, Poltava, Sumy and Kharkiv — were without electricity, officials said. In Kharkiv, electrically powered trolley buses and trams glided to a stop. Electric trains from Kyiv headed to the country’s west didn’t leave the station.

Experts on Ukraine’s electrical grid and municipal heating have said it is a hard target to fully disable, making it unlikely a demoralizing nationwide freeze awaits Ukraine over the winter.

In the Soviet era, the country was a center of hydroelectric and nuclear power generation and today has about twice as much generating capacity as domestic demand. Ukraine exports electricity to the European Union, but suspended exports on Monday after the strikes, according to the country’s energy ministry.

Missile strikes can cause temporary or regional blackouts but are unlikely to plunge the entire country into darkness, Ivan Plachkov, a former energy minister, said in an interview. He added that the centralized heating systems that circulate hot water to neighborhoods often have built-in backup systems.

City authorities throughout Ukraine have also been preparing warm spaces heated by wood or coal stoves, where residents can move if their apartments lose heat.

“Ukraine is prepared as much as possible for this scenario,” Mr. Plachkov said. “People are preparing for winter. After these strikes, the fight will go on.”

President Biden condemns ‘the utter brutality of Mr. Putin’s illegal war.’

“These attacks only further reinforce our commitment to stand with the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes,” Mr. Biden said.

The White House said that Mr. Biden spoke with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Monday to express his condolences for those killed and injured in the “senseless” attack.

“President Biden pledged to continue providing Ukraine with the support needed to defend itself, including advanced air defense systems,” it said in a statement.

The American president is expected to attend a virtual meeting on Tuesday of the leaders of the Group of 7 nations, which includes the United States, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The group will discuss the missile attacks and the latest developments in Ukraine, according to a European Union official.

State Department officials said that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke on Monday to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba about Russia’s missile strikes, telling his counterpart that the attack was “horrific.”

“The Secretary commended Ukraine for not allowing President Putin to break Ukraine’s spirit and reaffirmed U.S. resolve to support Ukraine,” said Ned Price, a State Department spokesman.

With a large-scale strike on Ukraine, Putin bows to domestic pressure.

“There’s no hot water, part of the city is without power,” one anchor announced, describing the scene in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.

The sharp shift was a sign that domestic pressure over Russia’s flailing war effort had escalated to the point where President Vladimir V. Putin felt a decisive show of force was necessary.

His military has come under increasingly withering criticism from the war’s supporters for not being aggressive enough in its assault on Ukraine, a chorus that reached a fever pitch after Saturday’s attack on the 12-mile bridge to the annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea — a symbol of Mr. Putin’s rule.

With Monday’s brutal escalation of the war effort, Mr. Putin in part appears to be responding to those critics, momentarily quieting the clamors of hard-liners furious with the Russian military’s humiliating setbacks on the battlefield.

“This is important from the domestic political perspective, first and foremost,” Abbas Gallyamov, a Russian political analyst and former Putin speechwriter, said of Monday’s strikes. “It was important to demonstrate to the ruling class that Putin is still capable, that the Army is still good for something.”

But with his escalation, Mr. Putin is also betting that Russian elites — and the public at large — do indeed see it as a sign of strength, rather than a desperate effort to inflict more pain in a war that Russia appears to be losing.

“The response was supposed to show power, but in fact it showed powerlessness,” Mr. Gallyamov said. “There’s nothing else the army can do.”

After Monday’s strikes, some of the invasion’s harshest critics among the Russian hawks declared that the military was finally doing its job. The strongman leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov — who recently excoriated the army’s “incompetent” leadership — said in a Telegram post that he was now “100 percent happy” with the war effort.

“Run, Zelensky, run,” he wrote, referring to Ukraine’s president.

Other cheerleaders of the war triumphantly recalled Mr. Putin’s declaration in July that Russia had not “started anything yet in earnest” in Ukraine.

“Now, it seems, it’s started,” one state television talk show host, Olga Skabeyeva, said.

Mr. Putin described Monday’s strikes as a response to Ukrainian “terrorist acts,” casting them as a one-time assault to deter future Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. In his home city of St. Petersburg, where he had traveled on Friday for his 70th birthday, Mr. Putin spoke on national television for just over three minutes in what the Kremlin characterized as the start of a meeting with his Security Council.

He made a point of saying the strikes came at the military’s initiative, an apparent effort to head off assertions that he was plotting the war effort in isolation.

“This morning, at the suggestion of the Ministry of Defense and according to the plan of the Russian General Staff, a massive strike with air, sea and land-based high-precision long-range weapons was launched against Ukrainian energy, military command and communications facilities,” Mr. Putin said. “If attempts to carry out terrorist attacks on our territory continue, the measures taken by Russia will be tough and in their scale will correspond to the level of threats posed to the Russian Federation. No one should have any doubt about it.”

In his speech, Mr. Putin made one notable omission: he did not mention the West as the ultimate culprit behind Saturday’s Crimean bridge explosion or other suspected Ukrainian attacks. That was a departure from the typical Kremlin rhetoric that portrays Washington and London as the puppeteers behind Ukraine’s resistance.

The shift was a possible signal that the Russian leader was interested in controlling the escalation of the war, and that he was not on the verge of provoking a direct conflict with NATO.

But some signs pointed to Mr. Putin being prepared for a wider escalation of the war. On Saturday, he appointed a general known for his ruthlessness, Sergei Surovikin, to lead the war effort in Ukraine. And Mr. Putin’s closest international ally, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, declared on Monday that thousands of Russian soldiers would soon arrive in the country to form a joint military group with Belarusian forces — creating the specter of a new threat to Ukraine’s north.

Greg Yudin, a professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, said Mr. Putin had bent to pressure from right-wing hawks who are calling for even more escalation. He said he expected that Mr. Putin would “sooner or later” heighten the threats of potentially using tactical nuclear weapons.

In central Moscow, many people said they were unaware of what had happened in Ukraine. People soaked up the sun in the chic neighborhood of central Tsvetno, or rushed to work or appointments.

Some younger people, more attuned to social media, said they were aware of the strikes on Ukraine but felt powerless to assign blame. “It is bad when people are killed for any reason,” said Sasha, 19, a university student. Still, she went on, “In any fight, both sides are responsible.”

In Russia, the penalties for criticizing the war — or even using the term war — come with hefty fines and even jail time, so many Russians are cautious about making comments that might have a negative connotation about the war.

Valerie Hopkins reported from Moscow. Alina Lobzina also contributed reporting.

Russian troops will return to Belarus in large numbers, Lukashenko says.

In rambling remarks reported by the state news agency Belta, Mr. Lukashenko said that work had already started on the formation of what he called a “joint regional group of troops” to counter “possible aggression against our country” by NATO and Ukraine.

The Belarusian strongman, who has so far resisted pressure from Moscow to send in his own troops, accused Ukraine, which shares a long border with Belarus, of planning attacks from the south, without citing evidence.

“Ukraine doesn’t pose a threat to Belarus. It’s a lie,” Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a Belarusian opposition leader, said. “I urge the Belarusian military: don’t follow criminal orders, refuse to participate in Putin’s war against our neighbors.”

Statements by Mr. Lukashenko, an eccentric and highly erratic dictator, are rarely an accurate guide to current or future events. Just days before Russian troops stationed in Belarus attacked Ukraine in February, he emphatically denied that his territory would be used by Russia, a close ally, to attack his country’s southern neighbor.

The establishment of a joint force with Russia will reinforce the view in Ukraine that Belarus is clearly a “co-aggressor,” a label that Mr. Lukashenko has rejected but which took on new force on Monday after a barrage of Russian missile attacks on Kyiv and elsewhere, some of them launched from Belarusian territory, according to Ukrainian officials.

He gave no details on Monday of the size or precise purpose of the new joint force, stirring speculation that Belarus might send troops into Ukraine to help Russia’s flailing military campaign. Alternatively, he could be preparing his country for the arrival of thousands of freshly drafted Russian soldiers, some of them former convicts and many of them ill trained.

“Be ready to receive these people in the near future and place them where necessary, according to our plan,” Mr. Lukashenko told his military chiefs.

During his visit to St. Petersburg, Belarusian state media reported that Mr. Lukashenko had “stressed the need to take measures in case of the deployment of nuclear weapons in Poland,” a remark that some analysts interpreted as preparing the ground for the possible deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, something that he has long said would never happen.

Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst now in exile in Warsaw, said Mr. Lukashenko would likely try to resist deploying his own troops in Ukraine because that “would be so dangerous for him on so many levels. It would be catastrophic politically.”

But, Mr. Shraibman added, “it is clear that what is left of his autonomy is eroding as we speak.”

Heavily dependent on Moscow for money, fuel and security assistance, all vital to his own survival after 28 years in power, Mr. Lukashenko is widely believed to be under growing Russian pressure to get more involved in the Ukraine war.

Russia massed tens of thousands of troops in Belarus before its February invasion and used Belarusian territory as a staging ground for its initial, unsuccessful assault on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Moscow still has hundreds of troops in Belarus, from which it launches missiles and bombing raids, but their number is now expected to increase sharply.

Andrei Sannikov, who served as deputy foreign minister under Mr. Lukashenko during his early period in power but fled into exile after being jailed, said Mr. Lukashenko was “running scared,” caught between pressure from Russia to help its demoralized forces in Ukraine and the knowledge that sending in Belarusian troops would be hugely unpopular, even among his loyalists.

He predicted that ultimately “his boots will inevitably be on the ground in Ukraine” because Mr. Lukashenko “has no real choice.”

“He is not taking decisions on the war. Putin takes all the decisions and tells Lukashenko what to do,” Mr. Sannikov said.

People pack the Kyiv subways, seeking shelter from the missile strikes.

But this time, the missile strikes reached the heart of the city, and many saw the attacks as attempts to terrorize the population.

“Russia is targeting civilians here, so we don’t know what we will do now,” Pavlo Pakkhom*ov, 33, said. He had been at the station for hours with his wife and 4-year-old daughter, who sat on cushions on the cold floor. They had returned to Kyiv only last month after several months away.

“When we heard explosions we decided to run for the subway,” he said. “The explosions were so loud.” He said they were unlikely to stay in their apartment, which is near government buildings, and may try to make it to a family home outside the city.

In many ways, the war in Ukraine has felt far away from Kyiv in the past few months. The rhythm of life settled into a new normal after Russian forces retreated from the suburbs and other areas they had controlled in the country’s northeast. But Monday’s strikes brought back the anxieties of the early days of the war — the uncertainty, the fear of imminent attack.

Weeds had begun to sprout from the sandbags put down to protect monuments and statues around the capital from blasts. Stylish teenagers posed for photos in front of the destroyed Russian armored vehicles and tanks that have been put on display outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On Saturday night, young people had crowded bars, many of them offering celebratory toasts to a recent attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge.

Now those places are just minutes away from strikes that hit the city center on Monday morning. And many residents were bracing for more, as air raid sirens continued to sound through much of the day.

When the first blasts were heard in central Kyiv on Monday, many people said they were caught off guard.

“We were not ready,” said Konstantin Shton, 47, who was cleaning up debris outside a residential building on Monday afternoon. “People were feeling really relaxed. So when the siren went off, no one went to the shelter.”

That all changed when the missiles hit. Many breathed a collective sigh of relief when the air raid alert finally ended after several tense hours. People emerged from shelters in the city center to begin assessing the damage and sweeping up the broken glass blown out by the explosions. But it was short-lived — less than two hours later, another siren rang out indicating missiles in the air.

Sasha Buyvalova, 24, clutched a small dog and a suitcase as she and her boyfriend waited for a taxi to take them out of the city center. The windows in their apartment had been blown out by one of the blasts while they sheltered in the bathroom.

“If we weren’t in there, I am not sure what would have happened,” she said, her voice shaking.

On the side of the road, rubber gloves and bloodied bandages offered a stark reminder of the loss of life in the city just hours earlier.

Alla Rohatniova, 48, was trying to book transportation to western Ukraine with her husband on Monday afternoon. Two days ago, their home in the Kharkiv region had been destroyed by strikes there, and they had fled to Kyiv for safety.

“There is no safe place,” she said with a sigh. “Right now, we don’t know where they will strike; it could be anywhere.”

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kyiv.

Here is a snapshot of the damage across Ukraine.

Kyiv

The streets of Kyiv once again were a tableau of destruction not seen since the early days of the war.

Several missiles hit the capital during the morning rush hour, killing at least five people and breaking the sense of relative calm that had settled over Kyiv in recent months.

Videos from the scene of one strike appeared to show a crater of scorched earth in the middle of a playground. Images from elsewhere in the city showed charred cars and shards of glass from blown-out windows strewn across the streets.

A security camera captured a Russian missile narrowly missing a pedestrian bridge at 8 a.m., shrouding it in a plume of smoke and sending a civilian running for his life. The strike landed close to the People’s Friendship Arch, a gigantic salute to Ukraine-Russia friendship, which was renamed the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian people in May.

“It is not clear why they shoot rockets at a pedestrian bridge where people and children are walking,” said Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, as he surveyed the scenes of destruction across the city. “It shows who the Russians are when they hit such objects.”

Officials urged residents to shelter and limit their electricity usage after energy infrastructure was hit.

Dnipropetrovsk

In the Dnipropetrovsk region of central Ukraine — which had been seen as a relatively safe haven for internally displaced people fleeing frontline areas — at least four people were killed and 19 injured, according to the head of the regional military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko. The strikes also knocked out power to 80,000 people, he said.

Officials in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city of Kryvyi Rih, which came under attack, urged businesses to remain closed and residents to limit their electricity usage.

Lviv

An explosion in the western city of Lviv hit a “critical infrastructure facility,” causing electricity and hot water outages in the city, according to its mayor, Andriy Sadovyi. “A third of the traffic lights do not work,” he said in a Telegram post.

“Take care of yourself and your family!” said Maksym Kozytskyi, the head of the Lviv regional administration, urging residents to remain in shelters because of the fear of additional strikes.

Mykolaiv

The mayor of the southern port city of Mykolaiv said in a Telegram post that all streetlights, including traffic lights, would be turned off and electrical vehicles on the streets would be reduced, after strikes were reported in the city.

Kharkiv

Electricity shortages brought trams and trolley buses to a halt in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, according to the mayor. Subway service was also suspended, with the stations being used as shelters, he said in a Telegram post.

Poltava

“This morning is the most difficult in recent times,” said Dmytro Lunin, the head of the local military administration in the Poltava region of central Ukraine, where many residential areas had gone dark.

More explosions were heard in the early evening. “Two rockets were shot down in the Kremenchuk district,” Mr. Lunin said in another update, adding that debris from the intercepted rockets had injured three people.

Zaporizhzhia

Hours before the strikes in Kyiv, a dozen missiles hit the southern city of Zaporizhzhia overnight, the Ukrainian military governor in the region, Oleksandr Starukh, said on Telegram. A local news outlet, Zaporizhzhia Info, reported that one rocket had hit an apartment building “where people were sleeping.” While the Russians were testing the country with “particular frenzy,” he said, Ukrainians had been experiencing this since the start of the war. “I am sure we will survive,” he said.