The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine (GUR) said on Friday that Russia had stockpiled missiles for a month to carry out a new large-scale strike on Thursday, Ukrainian Pravda reports.

“The racists continue their missile terror, but already taking into account the shortage of high-precision missiles they have today, we can say that they have been accumulating strength for a month, working, in particular, on production,” said Andriy Yusov, GOUT’s press secretary.

He noted that the missiles that the Russian arms industry can produce in a month were used by Moscow’s armed forces to destroy Ukrainian transformers.

Yusov said that Russia’s stockpiles of many types of missiles are “critically low” and that the increasing time interval between large-scale attacks is due to the fact that the Russians are trying to compensate for the consumption of ammunition by production, but cannot produce the necessary volumes.

“[Stocul de rachete] Since the beginning of the large-scale aggression, Caliber has fallen to 7% of its strength. They cannot even compensate for these losses through production,” he said.

In Thursday’s new massive attack, Russian forces also fired six Kinzhal (Dagger) hypersonic missiles, the largest number ever used in a single attack, and powerful Kh-22 anti-ship missiles. Although they were designed for use against enemy fleets, Russia is now launching them at land targets in Ukraine.

What Ukraine says about Russia’s latest missile strike

The air defense forces of Ukraine note that in total Russia launched 81 missiles and intercepted 34 of the 48 cruise missiles launched in the country as part of the new attack. But Ukrainian air defense is no match for Russian ballistic missiles, especially hypersonic ones.

In an intervention on Ukrainian television after this attack, the spokesman of the Air Force of Ukraine Yuriy Ignat said that “the enemy used a wide range of weapons (…) to distract the attention of air defense.”

The Ukrainian military said that despite the large number of hypersonic missiles launched by Russia in one strike, this does not indicate “any change in enemy tactics.”

One possibility is that Russia is running out of other types of missiles it would normally use for such attacks, so it is turning to more expensive designs.

But during the war, Western analysts were repeatedly wrong about the number of missiles Russia would still have in its arsenal, and predictions are conflicting.

Thus, in December, the Secretary of the National Security Council Oleksiy Danilov estimated that Russia could carry out 3-4 more large-scale attacks before the reserves are exhausted.

But at the end of January, the head of the Estonian intelligence service, Margo Grosberg, said that Russia could launch repeated massive missile strikes on Ukraine within nine months.

Follow the latest events of the 380th day of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HOTNEWS.RO.