Russia launched several volleys of missiles at Ukraine on Thursday, with strikes reported all over the country, including the capital, Kyiv, where at least one person was killed, the authorities said.

A day after Germany and the US pledged to send dozens of battle tanks to Ukraine, a significant step up in western military support, large booms shook Kyiv about 10am local time.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force command said that Russian bombers had fired about 30 missiles at targets around the country.

“Explosions have been heard in Kyiv — stay in your shelters,” Anton Gerashchenko, a senior interior ministry official, posted on Telegram, a messaging service.

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, later said that one person had died and that two were wounded when a projectile hit a building in the city’s south.

There were also reports of missile strikes in the Vinnytsia region in western Ukraine and outside Odesa. For the past week, Russia’s Air Force has been conducting exercises north of Ukraine in Belarus, keeping the country on heightened alert.

Countrywide air attack sirens have sounded each time Russian planes take to the air. Overnight, according to Ukraine’s Air Force Command, Ukraine’s air defences shot down 24 Iranian-made Shahed explosive drones.

Crowds of people took cover in the capital’s metro stations during a nationwide air alert before Russia unleashed the latest in more than a dozen air attacks on the power grid since October that have caused sweeping outages during winter. The missile strikes followed a drone attack overnight.

Air defences shot down 47 of 55 missiles that included at least one Kh-47 Kinzhal hypersonic missile, said General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’stop military commander.

Twenty incoming missiles were downed in the vicinity of Kyiv.

“The goal of the Russians remains unchanged: psychological pressure on Ukrainians and the destruction of critical infrastructure,” he wrote.

“But we cannot be broken!” Air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said as many sixTu-95 warplanes had taken off from the Arctic region of Murmansk in northern Russia and launched long-range missiles.

At one point, Kyiv authorities said all the incoming missiles had been shot down byair defences, but warned the threat had not passed.

Minutes later, loud explosions rocked two districts of Kyiv. City officials said a 55-year old man had been killed and two other people wounded when non-residential buildings in the south of the city were struck. Prime Minister DenysShmyhal said Russia’s main target had been energy facilities and that the strikes aimed to deprive Ukrainians “of light and heating” with the temperature in Kyiv at below freezing.

“Unfortunately, substations were hit. But the situation in the energy system remains under control,” he wrote on Telegram.

New York Times News Service and Reuters