Ukraine: new strikes on infrastructure in kyiv

In kyiv, the population gathers in the metro stations during the Russian air raids (illustration image).

REUTERS - Valentin Ogirenko

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

In Ukraine, after several days of relative calm on the air front, new missiles fell on essential infrastructure this Saturday, January 14 in the morning in kyiv, the capital.

Little information is filtering out on the targets of these bombardments, but what is new is that this time the anti-aircraft alarms did not go off.

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With our correspondent in Kiev,

Saturday morning, explosions sounded very loud in kyiv, but this time without warning.

A little later, the anti-aircraft defense started to work, the alerts, however, came late.

Usually, an anti-aircraft alarm precedes the arrival in the sky of cruise missiles, allowing the population to anticipate, to go to the shelters, and the anti-aircraft batteries to intervene against intruding objects.

Defense taken aback

The anti-aircraft defense seems, there, to have been taken aback.

And for Ukrainian officials, this means that the Russians used not

-type cruise missiles , described as " 

 -type ballistic missiles

, much faster and difficult to detect by current means of defense. anti-aircraft.

Ballistic or hypersonic?

Several explanations are possible: The Russians could run out of stocks of cruise missiles, or understand that they are very often intercepted, and that now the most effective weapon on civilian infrastructure is the ballistic or hypersonic missiles whose , currently, only the American

anti-missile system 

provides protection.

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