Russia says its overnight Ukraine strike was a response to Kyiv’s ‘terrorist acts’

MOSCOW, June 2 (Reuters) – Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that a massive overnight attack on Ukraine was in response to what it called “terrorist actions” against targets inside Russia and hit a number of Ukrainian military targets.

Russian drones and missiles struck Ukraine’s capital Kiev and other cities early Tuesday, killing at least 11 people and wounding more than 100, Ukrainian officials said, following days of warnings about Moscow’s plans for a major attack.

“Overnight, in response to the terrorist actions of the Kiev regime, the armed forces of the Russian Federation carried out a major attack using high-precision long-range air, land and sea weapons,” the Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement. The statement was included.

It was stated that Russia attacked seven regions of Ukraine, including Kiev, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, using hypersonic missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, and successfully targeted areas useful for the Ukrainian armed forces, such as fuel and transportation facilities and military airfields.

The Kremlin warned last week that Russia would begin launching “systematic attacks” on targets in Kiev in retaliation for a devastating drone strike on a student dormitory in Russian-controlled Luhansk in eastern Ukraine that left 21 people dead.

Ukraine said it targeted a drone command center in the region, not the students. Putin said Monday evening that Kiev had “turned a new page in a series of crimes” with the dormitory strike and later attack on an apartment building in a Russian-controlled part of Ukraine’s Kherson region. Both sides deny that civilians were deliberately targeted.

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Andrew Osborn)