Russia launches massive attack across Ukraine | BBC News
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Transcript
00:00Russia is carrying out a massive aerial attack on the country.
00:04Dozens of drones and cruise missiles have been launched and all of the
00:09country is under air raid alert. I want to show you these pictures which are
00:14from the capital Kiev where as you can see hundreds of people have headed down
00:20to the subway to shelter. It's after those alerts were sounded in the capital
00:26and across the country. There you can see pets taken with the people who have
00:31gone down into that subway. Now explosions have been heard in numerous
00:37cities from Lutsk in the west to Dnipro in the east. Now so far at least three
00:44people have been killed. Now we will be live in the capital Kiev with our
00:50correspondent Abdul Jalil Abdullah Salaf and he joins us now. Just if you can
00:56outline where these drone and missile attacks are happening Abdul Jalil.
01:04The drones and missiles headed to a number of regions across Ukraine including the
01:10western region of Lviv in the south of the city of Odessa in the north as well
01:16as the capital Kiev as well. In the early hours today the Ukrainian Air
01:20Force warned its citizens saying that Russian bombers more than a dozen of
01:26Russian bombers that could carry cruise missiles were in the air and already at
01:30that time we were getting reports about Shahed drones several dozens of drones
01:35heading towards different regions and shortly after we heard explosions in the
01:41skies over Kiev and it sounded like it was air defense systems engaging those
01:46drones and missiles. We still don't know the exact scale of the damage following
01:51this attack and so far we only heard about three people who got killed during
01:57that time but clearly this number could arise later today and what is
02:05interesting is that this attack happened early in the morning when people were
02:09still getting up they were still at home and some of them were already
02:12driving towards work so a lot of people were caught off guard when the attack
02:17happened and not everyone were able to get to the shelter to the bomb shelters
02:22and even though the warning did come early enough some people may simply had
02:27no time to get to the shelter. Yeah we have seen pictures of people in Kiev
02:32going down into the subway of course at the start of the conflict this was a
02:36regular occurrence where they went down into those shelters but there has been a
02:42relative calm at times so this an escalation from Russia do you think this
02:47is related to the fact that Ukraine has gone into Russian territory over the last
02:53month? Well such aerial attacks have been happening frequently it's not the first
03:00time when Russia launches such a massive attack targeting different cities in
03:04Ukraine and of course the timing of this attack is happening shortly after the
03:09Ukrainian incursion in Russia's Kursk region and some observers are
03:14linking this attack to those events but such attacks as I said have been
03:21happening before as well so it's really hard to say whether it's linked
03:24directly to those events happening in Kursk region but Russia have been
03:30targeting the energy infrastructure of Ukraine they've been targeting other
03:33areas in this country a lot and just yesterday they hit a hotel in the city
03:43of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine where several journalists were injured
03:48including a British security adviser who was part of the Reuters team who was
03:52there as well he was killed in the attack. I've just seen Ukraine's
03:56presidential chief of staff is calling on Kiev's allies to allow long-range
04:00strikes on Russia after Moscow's attack this is what Kiev would like isn't it
04:06the the Western governments who've given them the jets and the ammunition to
04:11allow them to attack Russia? That is right Ukraine have been repeatedly
04:17asking its allies to provide them long-range missiles to hit the targets
04:23inside Russia including the airfields where those jets and bombers take off to
04:29attack Ukrainian cities and Ukraine was saying that if they do get those weapons
04:35it would allow them to defend its cities to defend its citizens much better and
04:39prevent those aerial attacks including prevent the the attacks using cruise
04:46missiles and ballistic missiles because they could target the airfields and the
04:51airbases and of course the some of the countries like the US allowed to use
04:59Atacams long-range missiles but also they limited to what extent they
05:06could use those weapons so they limited the range and they could only use those
05:12weapons within the border areas and not further and therefore Ukraine is asking
05:18now to give to give them a long-range weapons such as stone shadows with
05:24and other weapons that could hit a target deep inside Russia and this would
05:31allow as they say to protect the cities