CBS News
Russia fires missiles at Ukraine after Kyiv’s first use of long-range American missiles inside Russia
Russia launched a barrage of missiles at Ukraine Thursday in its first major retaliation for Ukraine’s attack earlier in the week on a military facility in the Russian region of Bryansk. That strike saw the Ukrainians use American-made and supplied long-range missiles known as ATACMS, which President Biden had given the Ukrainian forces permission to fire deeper into Russian territory only two days earlier.
Moscow had warned the U.S. and its NATO allies for months against granting Ukraine permission to fire Western missiles into Russia, and Mr. Biden’s weekend decision to permit such strikes drew stark new warnings from lawmakers and Russian media close to President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. was escalating the nearly three-year conflict at the risk of sparking a new world war.
The U.S. and its allies have argued that it’s Putin escalating the war he started by ordering the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, including by deploying more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers to bolster his own forces in recent weeks. But there was little doubt that Moscow would respond to the Ukrainians’ first use of the American ATACMS to strike inside Russia somehow, and air raid sirens blared across the country Wednesday as the U.S. closed its embassy in Kyiv and warned of a possible imminent “significant air attack.”
The attack didn’t come on Wednesday, but rather overnight, with Russian missiles targeting several cities but, hitting central-eastern Dnipro the hardest. The Ukrainian Air Force claimed that Russia’s assault on the city included its first use during the war of an intercontinental ballistic missile, though a Western official told CBS News on Thursday that an ICBM was not used in the strike.
The official said Russia used at least one ballistic missile in the Thursday morning strike, but not an ICBM.
State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk Region/Anadolu/Getty
During a live televised news conference in Moscow on Thursday, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova received a phone call and a man identified only as “Masha” could be heard ordering her not to make any comment on the “ballistic missile strike that the Westerners have started talking about” in Dnipro.
The Ukrainian air force did not say what the purported Russian ICBM had targeted or whether it had caused any damage, but the Dnipro regional governor, Serhiy Lysak, said the strike damaged an industrial enterprise and ignited fires in the city, wounding 15 people.
The Ukrainian Air Force said the Russian attack also included a Kinzhal hypersonic missile and seven cruise missiles — all weapons used many times previously by Russia during the war. Six of the Russian missiles were shot down, the air force said.
The strike came hours after the CBS News team in Kyiv, along with hundreds of thousands of residents of the Ukrainian capital, were forced to scramble for cover in underground parking lots, metro stations and basements on Wednesday as air raid alarms sounded.
In the end, no missiles landed on Wednesday, leaving Ukraine to accuse Russia of a psychological attack.
“We are very worried,” one young Kyiv resident told CBS News. “We want to keep our country. We want to live in peace.”
After more than two and a half years of war in Ukraine, the scars and the anxiety run deep.
“It could happen any minute, any hour,” Major Taras Berezovets, of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense force, told CBS News, arguing that Russia and Putin are blackmailing his country, trying to frighten Ukrainians into surrendering – “trying to make the conclusion that any sort of opposition to Russian invasion is absolutely useless.”
Some believe both Russia and Ukraine are trying to maximize their gains — and with them, their leverage for any future cease-fire talks — before President-elect Donald Trump comes back into office in January.
There’s significant fear in Ukraine and in European capitals that Trump could cut U.S. support for Kyiv, forcing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government to accept a negotiated truce with Russia that sees Ukraine give up land occupied by Putin’s forces.
As a child, 40-year-old Dontal Johnson dreamed of becoming a doctor, but never saw himself represented in the profession.
“I had never seen a Black doctor growing up, and one of the crazier things is I never saw a Black doctor until I hit college,” Johnson said.
Johnson decided to apply to medical schools in Texas, but when a friend told him about a potential school in Nashville, Tennessee, full of Black students, he was in disbelief.
“He started describing a place of people that looked like me that were dentists, doctors, scientists. So I went home that night. It was still — I had dialup internet — so I had to wait for it to pop up. And then these photo stills came across from Meharry, and I applied that night at maybe like 1 or 2 a.m.”
After graduating from Meharry Medical College — a historically Black institution — he decided to stay in the community, and is now a pediatrician and professor there.
“I think one of the things that’s really coming to light, that patient population of African Americans and how systemic racism, how history, how the health care profession overall has not always been there for this patient population,” Johnson said.
Black patients have better overall health outcomes when treated by Black doctors, according to recent studies.
To further those connections, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced a $600 million gift to all four medical schools at historically Black colleges and universities — Meharry, Morehouse School of Medicine, Howard University College of Medicine and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. Together they have educated roughly 50% of all Black doctors in the United States, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Currently, African Americans make up about 14% of the population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But they represent just 5.2% of doctors nationwide, according to AAMC.
“Having a health care professional is important in the community, but also having a Black health care professional raises all the boats,” said Dr. Valerie Montgomery-Rice, president of Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. “First of all, it’s going to allow us to educate and train more Black and Brown physicians, and it’s going to allow those students to have more choice in where they want to practice and to be less burdened with debt.”
That’s something she’s already seen.
In 2020, Bloomberg gave the Morehouse School of Medicine $26 million to help students pay down debt. Resident physician Jamil Joyner received $100,000.
“It not only says, ‘We believe in Black doctors,’ it says, ‘We believe in Black institutions, and how they will play a role in changing health care for Black individuals,'” Joyner said.
For Dr. Dontal Johnson, more investment in Black doctors is needed.
“I’m a living witness of that, of training of African American physicians, physicians that cater and care for the underserved. So when you look at the data together and say that, hey, when we partner with African American physicians and we put them in communities, we actually see less strokes, we see less hypertension in the community, we see less obesity,” Johnson said.
With healthier communities, comes a healthier nation.
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
