TV News LIES

Ukraine's capital was subjected to the largest drone attack since the start of Russia's war, local officials said, as Kyiv prepared to mark the anniversary of its founding on Sunday. At least one person were killed.

Russia launched the "most massive attack" on the city overnight Saturday with Iranian-made Shahed drones, said Serhii Popko, a senior Kyiv military official. The attack lasted more than five hours, with air defense reportedly shooting down more than 40 drones.

A 41-year-old man was killed and a 35-year-old woman was hospitalized when debris fell on a seven-story nonresidential building and started a fire, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

Ukraine's air force said that Saturday night was also record-breaking in terms of Shahed drone attacks across the country. Of the 54 drones launched, 52 were shot down by air defense systems.

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Ukraine has entered “a new phase of the war,” a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told NBC News Saturday as speculation about its long-anticipated counteroffensive ratcheted up.

“Now we see the intensifying attacks on the Russian rear supplies,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, adding that preparations were taking place to strike back at the Kremlin's forces.

“We are preparing the battlefield for the new phase of the war. It’s going on now. It is a large number of measures in different sectors of the front line,” he said, conceding that preparation was well underway.

During the interview, Podolyak also praised a slickly produced video posted on Telegram Saturday by Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander in chief of Ukraine's armed forces.

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One of Ukraine's top generals has warned Russian forces they will come to "envy the dead" when his troops try and punch through their fortifications in the much-anticipated counteroffensive.

In a rare interview, Brigadier-General Sergii Melnyk told the ABC, it will not be long before the full-scale operation to liberate Ukrainian territory begins.

"I can say one thing. It will take place in the near future, and it will be a very powerful special operation that will definitely lead to the defeat of the Russian Federation," he said.

It was widely believed the counteroffensive would begin in the European spring — next week marks the start of summer.

Ukraine says it is waiting for the right moment — when the weather is good, the ground is firm and its armed forces are ready to use equipment sent by Western allies.

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Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of Russia's infamous Wagner group and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, this week detailed Moscow's failures in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking in an interview with pro-Russian blogger Konstantin Dolgov, Prigozhin noted that Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, only helped strengthen Kyiv's military.

"If they had a notional 500 tanks at the beginning of a special military operation, or 5,000 tanks now; if they had 20,000 able to fight, they now have 400,000 able to fight," he said, according to translations from a video shared on Twitter by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs.

"So how did we demilitarize [Ukraine]? It turns out that, on the contrary, we have militarized Ukraine. I think the Ukrainians are one of the strongest armies today," the Wagner chief continued.

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