U.S. Embassy in Kyiv closes over attack fears after Ukraine strikes Russia

KYIV - American officials warned Wednesday of a “potential significant air attack” on Kyiv and said the U.S. Embassy in the capital would be closed “out of an abundance of caution” after Ukrainian forces struck an arms depot inside Russia with U.S.-supplied weapons systems.

“Embassy employees are being instructed to shelter in place,” a statement on the embassy website said. “The U.S. Embassy recommends U.S. citizens be prepared to immediately shelter in the event an air alert is announced.”

The Italian, Greek and Spanish embassies in Kyiv would also be closed temporarily, statements on their websites and media reports said. The Italian Embassy warned of a “possible high-intensity airstrike,” citing the U.S. Embassy statement.

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, however, noted that over the past 1,000 days of war, the threat of airstrikes “has, unfortunately, been a daily reality.”

“We believe it would be appropriate for our partners to respond on the 1,001st day in the same way they did on the preceding days, without adding to unnecessary informational escalation,” spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military intelligence service, the GUR, reported that Russia was spreading a false message, allegedly issued by the GUR, about a massive missile attack on Ukrainian cities.

“This message is a fake, it contains grammatical errors typical for Russian information and psychological operations,” the GUR wrote on Telegram. “The enemy, unable to subjugate Ukrainians by force, resorts to measures of intimidation and psychological pressure on society.”

Russian forces did pummel Ukraine with waves of self-destructing drones and missiles overnight Wednesday - a regular occurrence since September. Ukraine’s air force said that of 122 drones launched at targets across the country, 56 were shot down and 64 failed to reach their targets.

In Kyiv, debris from intercepted drones fell in three districts, but no damage or injuries were reported, Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram.

The attacks - and the potential for an even larger one Wednesday - came a day after Ukraine fired American-made ATACMS missiles inside Russia for the first time.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the attack on an arms depot in Russia’s western Bryansk region was largely ineffective. But Ukrainian officials said the strike caused a conflagration at the depot in the city of Karachev, just over 70 miles from the Russia-Ukraine border - and about 210 miles southwest of Moscow.

The strike came after a reversal in the position of the Biden administration, which had previously prohibited Kyiv from using American-made weapons systems inside Russia.

Russian officials have said that allowing strikes within their country would be a “red line,” though Moscow has made similar warnings during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin warned that “attempts by certain NATO allies” to help Ukraine with long-range strikes on Russian territory “will not go unpunished,” in an interview in Russia’s National Defense magazine published Wednesday.

The Biden administration also authorized sending antipersonnel land mines to Ukraine to slow Russia’s steady advance in the east, another reversal in long-standing U.S. policy.

Even before receiving permission to use the U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile System, Ukrainian forces regularly struck locations inside Russia with their own long-range drones.

Ukrainian drones overnight hit an arms depot near the town of Kotovo in Russia’s Novgorod region, Andriy Kovalenko of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council said Wednesday. The area is more than 400 miles from the Ukrainian border.

The depot stored artillery and mortar shells and a variety of missiles, including missiles supplied by North Korea, Kovalenko wrote in a post on Telegram.

Russian forces “destroyed and intercepted” 44 Ukrainian drones overnight Wednesday, including 20 “over the Novgorod region,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a social media post. The statement did not mention the arms depot, however.

On Sunday, one of the largest attacks on Ukraine in months - with 120 cruise, ballistic and aeroballistic missiles and 90 drones - wreaked extensive damage on Ukraine’s electric grid, officials said.

This week, Ukraine’s power companies were forced to return to rationing power throughout the country to conserve energy, as temperatures dropped to near freezing. If Russia’s attacks continue, Ukrainians could face a winter with only a few hours of electricity per day, officials said.

At his Wednesday news briefing, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied reports that President Vladimir Putin was open to freezing the war, one of the possible options for resolving the conflict that has been suggested by some members of the incoming Trump administration.

“Some variation of freezing this conflict will not work for us,” he added. “It is important for us to achieve our goals, which are well known to everyone.”

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Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, and Kostiantyn Khudov in Kyiv contributed to this report.