President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday that Ukraine had information from intelligence that Russia was planning new ballistic missile strikes, and that Ukraine needed the means to counter them, Reuters reported.

Source: Reuters

"Now we have information from intelligence about preparations by the Russians of new ballistic missile strikes," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address, according to Reuters. "We need the means to take out all this Russian evil. We are expecting relevant decisions."

Zelenskiy repeated Ukraine's pleas for its Western allies to provide more air-defence weapons to counter Russian attacks, specifically missiles for the US Patriot system, Reuters reported. Ukraine has said it faces an acute shortage of air-defence missiles as Russian drone and missile attacks target its cities, rail network and other critical infrastructure.

He also praised long-range attacks on Russian targets, singling out strikes on Thursday that, he said, destroyed two Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber aircraft as well as a launching site for Russian Iskander missiles. Ukraine's naval forces issued a statement saying the two aircraft had been taken out at a base in the Volgograd region in central Russia, Reuters reported. Those claims are attributed to Ukrainian officials and were not independently verified in the Reuters report, which did not report a Russian response to the specific claim.

The warning came on a day when Ukrainian officials said Russian drone strikes hit a crowded rail platform in Dnipro and struck other cities. Read the earlier report here: Russian drone strikes kill 19 in three Ukrainian cities

Like Kyiv, Moscow denies deliberately targeting civilians. Both sides' battlefield claims in this war require attribution, and Awaaz Punjab reports Zelenskiy's intelligence warning and the Su-34 claim as Ukrainian statements, not as independently confirmed facts.