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  • 3/28/2024

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00:00 Cities of Odessa, Kharkiv and Zaporizhia were targeted during the night by Russia.
00:05 In Zaporizhia it was Shahed drones that were used, these Iranian-made drones
00:09 that the Ukrainians have nicknamed the mopeds of the sky.
00:13 I heard them flying over the city during the night and it's clear why they earned that nickname.
00:18 I could also hear mostly small arms fire, it seemed to me, being used to try to shoot them down.
00:24 I don't know whether they succeeded in shooting all of the drones down.
00:27 Certainly two people in Zaporizhia have been reported wounded
00:31 and several houses on the eastern edge of the city have been damaged.
00:35 But I don't know whether that was fragments of an intercepted drone that fell on those houses
00:40 or whether they were deliberately targeted by Russia.
00:42 In any case, it's clear that Russia has stepped up its campaign of nocturnal attacks on Ukraine
00:48 all across the country in recent days and that's why Volodymyr Zelensky
00:52 has also changed his tone a little bit.
00:54 The Ukrainian president, who just a month ago in a press conference was saying that he understood
00:59 why countries like Italy or Germany can't supply Ukraine with more of their most sophisticated air defence systems
01:05 because he said they just don't have enough and they need some of them back home.
01:08 Now he's saying no, send them please as soon as possible because Ukraine really needs them.
01:13 There's clearly a sense of urgency here.
01:16 It has to be said that the western-supplied air defence systems,
01:19 both European and the American-made Patriots, have performed extremely well in Ukraine,
01:24 exceeding expectations in many cases, even shooting down hypersonic missiles
01:29 that Russia had declared unshoot-downable and many American experts have also said
01:34 couldn't be shot down even with their systems.
01:36 The latest and most impressive example of this, as we've learned,
01:40 is that on Monday the two rockets that were fired at Kiev were Zircon rockets.
01:45 This is Russia's most modern, most expensive and supposedly best hypersonic missile.
01:52 The Russians had boasted that they were absolutely impossible to shoot down by any system.
01:56 The Ukrainians are saying that they shot both of them down, the ones that were fired at Kiev.
02:00 I've seen photographic evidence pretty clearly showing that at least one of them was shot down
02:06 and even if it's only one of the two that was actually intercepted, that's still extremely impressive,
02:11 proving once again that the reality doesn't always meet Russian rhetoric
02:16 in terms of how powerful Russian weapon systems are.

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