Latest news on the Ukraine war: Putin launches hypersonic missile attack on Ukrainian cities in daylight – at least 30 dead when children’s hospital is hit | World news

Sean Bell, military analyst at Sky News spoke today about the deadly Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities.

“What we know is that there is a major shortage of missiles in Russia and Ukraine,” he said.

“They want to use these missiles as effectively as possible, and we have seen Russia step up its attacks on Ukraine’s weapons production capacity, its energy infrastructure and its airfields.

“And we don’t know exactly where the debris will land when these missiles are launched from the Patriot missiles that are now in Ukraine. Where the explosive device will actually detonate, we don’t know, but it’s quite clear that Russia is now trying to step up its efforts.

“This is the summer offensive. If you remember, last year we talked about the Ukrainian spring offensive. That really fizzled out.

“And this year, because of the gap in arms supplies from the West, we fully expected Russia to launch its big summer offensive. We’re in the middle of it, but Russia is stuck on the front lines, suffering huge losses and I suspect this is a pretty intense deployment in the run-up to the NATO summit. Just to show that Russia is not finished yet.”

Bell then addressed Russia’s claims that damage to civilian targets in Kyiv was the result of the use of Ukrainian missile defense systems, saying the evidence suggests that these claims may be true.

“We are in an information war and it is incredibly difficult to actually find out what is going on,” he said.

“I have to say that from a purely military perspective, no matter how darkly we want to portray Russia and President Putin, it is very difficult to see what benefit he could get from using his limited weapons stockpiles against civilian targets when he needs to stop the Ukrainian war effort.

“A good example of this is that Russia has continued or increased its attacks on Ukrainian airfields in recent weeks in an effort to knock out the Ukrainian Air Force, probably before the F-16s arrive.

“But the Ukrainians have been very clever here. They have started doing what they did in World War II, which is to set up wooden replicas of airplanes at airfields to ward off Russian missiles.

“So it’s pretty hard to understand why Russia would intentionally attack a civilian target. But as always in this brutal war, whenever there are missiles flying around and Patriot missiles are taking them out of the sky, there are going to be terrible casualties on the ground. And I think that’s what we’re seeing today.”