MONITORING (SW) – Russia confirmed that it had been hit with long-range missiles overnight just one day after Washington gave the go-ahead for American ATACMS to be used.
Ukraine used controversial missiles in a strike on Russia’s Bryansk region on Tuesday morning local time, the Russian ministry of defence in Moscow said.
Russia said they had shot down five missiles and damaged one more.
The attack comes after Vladimir Putin signed a decree broadening the scope for when Moscow will consider using nuclear weapons in the clear warning to the West and Ukraine, reported wires.
The Kremlin says the move, which enables Russia to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state if they are supported by nuclear powers, was “necessary to bring our principles in line with the current situation.”
Putin’s nuclear move came after the Biden administration gave Kyiv permission to use ATACMS.
Ukraine said Tuesday that its forces would never surrender to Russia, 1,000 days after Moscow launched its brutal invasion, while the Kremlin also pledged victory and escalated its nuclear sabre-rattling.
The grim anniversary opened with an overnight Russian strike in the eastern Ukrainian region of Sumy that gutted a Soviet-era resident building and killed at least nine people, including a child.
President Volodymyr Zelensky published images of rescue workers hauling bodies from the debris and called on Kyiv’s allies to “force” the Kremlin into peace.
Ukrainian forces have steadily been losing ground in the Kursk region and have warned that Russia has amassed a force of some 50,000 troops, including North Korean forces, to wrest back the region.
The anniversary of Russia’s invasion — launched on February 24, 2022 — comes at a perilous time for Ukrainian forces across the front, particularly near the war-battered cities of Kupiansk and Pokrovsk.
