The Ukrainian military destroyed eight of nine attack drones launched overnight by Russia, the air force said Sunday, a day after what Ukrainian officials said had been Russia’s largest drone attack of the war.

There were no immediate reports of damage or about where the remaining drone had struck.

Kyiv was rocked Saturday by Russia’s largest drone attack since its invasion of Ukraine in February of last year. Ukraine said it shot down 74 of the 75 Iranian-designed Shahed drones launched by Russia in a six-hour air raid.

Five people, including a child, were wounded in the attack, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko’s Telegram post. Sixty-six of the drones were downed over Kyiv, Ukraine’s air force said. The damage caused power outages for 17,000 people, a city official said.

Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Russia will target critical infrastructure in a winter aerial campaign, as it did last year.

“It looks like tonight we heard the overture. The prelude to the winter season,” Serhiy Fursa, a prominent Ukrainian economist, wrote on Facebook.

The Russian defense ministry said Sunday it intercepted at least 24 drones and shot down two Ukrainian S-200 surface-to-air missiles over Moscow, Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk and Bryansk.

“A mass drone attack was attempted overnight,” said Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, adding that Ukrainian drones were shot down in several areas of the Moscow region.

The missiles were shot down over the Sea of Azov, the ministry said.

One person was injured in Tula when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, the region’s governor, Alexei Dyumin, said.

The Kommersant newspaper said that flights were delayed or canceled at Moscow’s main airports because of the drone attack.

In the Russian-controlled Ukrainian region of Donetsk a Russian-installed official said that Ukrainian forces had struck the energy system, leaving some people without heat or power.

Russian soldiers’ morale

As the war grinds into its second winter, a growing number of Russian soldiers want to get out of Ukraine, as revealed in secret recordings of Russian soldiers calling home from the battlefields of the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine.

Secret recordings of these conversations, obtained by The Associated Press, offer a rare glimpse of the war through Russian eyes — a point of view that seldom appears in Western media, mainly because Russia has criminalized any critical conversation about the conflict in Ukraine. The recordings also show the grueling conditions Russian soldiers endure in the battlefield.

There’s no “dying the death of the brave here,” one soldier told his brother. “You just die, like an earthworm,” he said.

The voices in these calls are of men who didn’t or couldn’t flee mobilization. Some had no money, no education and no options. Others believed in patriotic duty.

The AP verified the identities of people in the calls by speaking with relatives and soldiers — some of whom are still at war in Ukraine — and researching open-source material linked to the phone numbers used by the soldiers.

There were also voices of soldiers committed to the fight.

“As long as we are needed here, we will carry out our task,” a soldier named Artyom told AP from eastern Ukraine at the end of May, where he’d been stationed for eight months without break. “Just stop asking me these stupid questions.”

Germany debt

Berlin may not be able to finance responses to growing challenges such as climate change and the Ukraine war as Europe’s largest economy has already dealt with years of chronic under-investment, contributing to its current stagnation, economists say.

German under-investment is already around 300 billion euros over the past decade vis-a-vis other AAA-rating economies, according to Scope Ratings.

Business and political leaders have even started to campaign publicly for fiscal rectitude.

“As I have long been saying, we must fear that the debt brake becomes ever more a brake on the future,” said Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner on social media platform X.

Saturday was Holodomor Remembrance Day in Ukraine, a time when Ukrainians remember the famine that starved several million people to death in the 1930s because of Soviet policies.

The Holodomor — which means “death by starvation” in Ukrainian — was a deliberate policy of Josef Stalin that Ukrainians, along with more than 30 countries, consider genocide but something Moscow denies.

Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia has carried out 911 attacks, killing 19 Ukrainians and wounding 84 across the country in the last week.

“The enemy is intensifying its attacks, trying to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians,” he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. It was doing so deliberately, “just like 90 years ago, when Russia killed millions of our ancestors.”

Some information for this article was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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