With African leaders visiting Ukraine, Russia fires missiles at Kyiv

The barrage was a departure from the Kremlin’s typical strategy of bombarding Ukrainian cities during the early-morning hours as residents attempt to sleep and it is easier to detect Ukrainian air defenses in the dark.

On Friday, Russia launched six Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missiles, six Kalibr cruise missiles and two self-destructing drones — “a massive combined air attack on Kyiv,” Serhiy Popko, the head of the city’s military administration, said in a post on the Telegram social media app.

Ukrainian officials said air defense systems intercepted the entire bombardment.

Vincent Magwenya, a spokesman for the South African president, said that Ramaphosa and the other leaders arrived in Kyiv “safely” and that the mission was “proceeding quite well and as planned,” but he did not mention the air attack.

Later, Magwenya tweeted: “Strangely, we didn’t hear the sirens or explosions.” However, the explosions were clearly audible to a Washington Post reporter and numerous observers on social media.

In a news conference later, however, Ramaphosa addressed the missile attack, saying it hadn’t deterred the mission but only made it more important. “It’s precisely this type of event that we saw today or witnessed or even experienced that makes us call for de-escalation.”

He said peace talks were important even as a conflict worsened, noting how former South African president Nelson Mandela saw the need for negotiations when he was in prison to bring an end to apartheid.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, expressed a degree of bafflement at the delegation’s plans to travel to Russia after it had fired missiles at them: “How logical it is, I don’t really understand.” He reiterated Ukraine’s long-held stance that negotiations could happen only when the Russians withdrew.

“We need real peace, and therefore, a real withdrawal of Russian troops,” he said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that “Russian missiles are a message to Africa: Russia wants more war, not peace.”

Ruslan Kravchenko, the head of the Kyiv regional military administration, said six people were injured by falling shrapnel in the Kyiv region, including one child, and three houses were destroyed.

The attack follows Ukrainian officials’ announcing modest but steady gains in their multipronged counteroffensive in the country’s east, saying they have retaken some 40 square miles of territory and seven villages. The claims could not independently be verified.

On Friday, Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Kovalyov said Kyiv’s forces had achieved “partial success” in the previous 24 hours. “Where Ukrainian soldiers are defending themselves, not a single position has been lost,” he said.

Commander of Ukraine’s ground forces Oleksandr Syrsky, in remarks posted on social media, said the battlefield situation in eastern Ukraine “remains tense.” Moscow’s “most combat capable units” were being transferred to the area around the eastern city of Bakhmut, while Russian forces carried out “powerful artillery fire and strikes by assault and army aircraft” on Ukrainian positions.

For its part, Russia’s Defense Ministry in its daily briefing said it had repelled numerous attacks along the front line. None of these claims could be verified, because of restrictions on reporting in the conflict zone.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that allies are looking to create a new NATO-Ukraine Council and hope to hold the first meeting at the summit of NATO leaders in Vilnius, Lithuania, next month.

The summit is expected to focus on questions of Ukraine’s membership in NATO, with Kyiv officials hoping for a clear path for joining the alliance, while other countries are looking more to short- and medium-term security guarantees.

The alliance says the upgrade from “NATO-Ukraine Commission” to “NATO-Ukraine Council” would give Ukraine a seat at the alliance table, allowing it to convene meetings and raise concerns.

“That is a different type of working together politically, and we will bring Ukraine closer to NATO in political terms,” Stoltenberg said.

But the proposal falls short of what Ukraine says it needs: full membership, including Article 5 protection. U.S. officials have given tentative backing to a plan that would allow Ukraine to avoid a formal process of candidacy — a Membership Action Plan — thereby shortening the period needed before joining.

Meanwhile, at Russia’s annual investment forum in St. Petersburg, once touted as Moscow’s answer to the Davos Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed on Friday that Ukraine’s leader, Zelensky, was not Jewish.

“I have a lot of Jewish friends, since childhood.” Putin said in a question-and-answer period, after delivering a 79-minute speech claiming Russia’s economy was strong and growing. “They say Zelensky isn’t a Jew.”

Putin said that Zelensky was a “disgrace” to the Jewish people and that he supported Nazis — a frequent but false assertion by the Kremlin. Both of Zelensky’s parents are Jewish, and members of his family were among the estimated 2 million Ukrainian Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

Putin repeated false claims that Russia did not start the war in Ukraine and said that he took military action to bring an end to the fighting that had taken place there since 2014.

Putin said Russia would use nuclear weapons only if there was a threat to its existence but said there was “no such need” to do so. He boasted about the quantity of Russians nuclear arms and dismissed any talk of reducing them.

“Russia has more nuclear weapons than NATO countries, they want us to reduce them, f— them,” he said.

He also confirmed earlier statements by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that Russia had started deploying nuclear weapons in Belarus and would complete the task by the end of the year, calling it a “deterrence measure.”

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum drew world leaders and hundreds of top international businesspeople, but this year’s event failed to draw any high-profile Western guests, reflecting Russia’s increasing economic and financial isolation.

Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.