Kyiv - Russia aimed at Western military supplies for Ukraine’s government with early Sunday airstrikes in Kyiv that it said destroyed tanks donated from abroad, a claim denied by a Ukrainian official. Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that any Western deliveries of long-range rocket systems to Ukraine would prompt Moscow to hit “objects that we haven’t yet struck.”
Ukraine's capital Kyiv were bombarded with missiles on Sunday for the first time in more than a month, while Ukrainian officials said a counter-attack on the main battlefield in the east had retaken half of the city of Sievierodonetsk.
Dark smoke could be seen from many miles away after the attack on two outlying districts of Kyiv. Ukraine said the strike hit a rail car repair works; Moscow said it had destroyed tanks sent by Eastern European countries to Ukraine.
At least one person was hospitalised though there were no immediate reports of deaths. The strike was a sudden reminder of war in a capital where normal life has largely returned since Russian forces were driven from its outskirts in March.
President Vladimir Putin warned the United States in an interview broadcast on Sunday that Russia would strike new targets if the West supplied longer-range missiles to Ukraine for use in high-precision mobile rocket systems.
The United States has ruled out sending its own or NATO forces to Ukraine but Washington and its European allies have supplied weapons to Kyiv such as drones, Howitzer heavy artillery, anti-aircraft Stinger and anti-tank Javelin missiles.
President Joe Biden last week said Washington would supply Ukraine with M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, after he received assurances from Kyiv that it would not be used to target Russia.
Putin said the arms shipments were "nothing new" and changed nothing but cautioned that there would be a response if the United States supplied longer-range munitions for the HIMARS systems which has a maximum range of up to 300 km (186.41 miles) or more.
If longer-range missiles are supplied, "we will strike at those targets which we have not yet been hitting," Putin was told the Rossiya-1 state television channel in an interview.
Sunday's attack was the first big strike on Kyiv since late April, when a missile killed a journalist. Recent weeks have seen Russia focus its destructive might mainly on front lines in the east and south, although Moscow occasionally strikes elsewhere in what it calls a campaign to degrade Ukraine's military infrastructure and block Western arms shipments.
Ukraine says it is fighting for its very survival against a Russian imperial-style land grab that has irrevocably divided the two biggest Eastern Slav peoples and sown death and destruction across Europe's second largest country by area.
-Reuters/Ap