KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine came under heavy attack from the air and from cyberspace on Tuesday, local officials said, as nearly 600 Russian shells, rockets and other projectiles rained down on a southern region and unidentified hackers knocked out phone and internet services of the country’s biggest telecom provider.

Ukraine has reported a successful hacking incident targeting Russia’s national tax system.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, visited Capitol Hill to urge the U.S. Congress for more military assistance. However, the availability of additional U.S. funding is uncertain due to a domestic political conflict.

According to the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, a person was fatally injured and four others were injured as a result of Russian bombing in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region over a 24-hour period. The number of projectiles launched at Kherson was the most recorded in the past two weeks.

As the winter season arrives and impedes troop mobility, there is minimal movement along the front line. As a result, air attacks become increasingly significant in the war effort.

Cyberattacks are also a busy battleground. Ukrainian telecom provider Kyivstar said it came under a “powerful” attack by hackers. The company serves more than 24 million mobile customers across the country.

According to a statement made by Kyivstar Director-General Oleksandr Komarov, the conflict with Russia has multiple aspects, including one in the realm of cyberspace.

The company did not provide an estimated time for when services will be restored. They stated that their experts are collaborating with law enforcement and state agencies to resolve the issue.

According to a tweet from Doug Madory, an analyst at Kentic Inc., Kyivstar’s internet usage started to decline at 9 a.m. and had nearly reached zero by noon, based on local time.

Madory, speaking to The Associated Press, explained that the decrease in traffic was gradual rather than a sudden drop. He compared this to the cyberattack on Ukrtelecom in March 2022, where there was a similar slow decline in internet traffic. At the time, Ukrtelecom was the seventh largest provider of internet traffic in Ukraine.

According to Madory, Kyivstar is the primary source of internet traffic in Ukraine.

However, the incident had broader effects. Ruslan Kravchenko, the head of the Kyiv regional administration, stated that it caused disruptions to the air raid warning system in certain areas of the Kyiv region. Similar interruptions were observed in the Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine. Additionally, according to local news outlet Suspilne, some ATMs owned by state-run Oschadbank were impacted by the attack and stopped functioning.

A Ukrainian internet-based bank reported successfully defending against a significant distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Tuesday. A DDoS attack utilizes a group of computers to send excessive and unwanted traffic to the intended website in an attempt to disrupt its functionality.

Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence reported a successful hacker operation that infected Russia’s Federal Taxation Service servers with malware.

As reported by an intelligence agency, the mission successfully accessed numerous main servers and over 2,300 local servers, causing disruption to communication within Russia’s tax system and causing damage to its database and backups.

There was no immediate response from Moscow regarding any potential attack, and the claim could not be confirmed by independent sources.

Additionally, Ukraine has stated that they have taken control of a strategically significant hill in the Donetsk region, where there has been minimal movement on the front line since 2014.

Zelenskyy announced on social media that his troops had taken the foothold, which provides a vantage point over the front line near Pivdenne, a mining town to the northwest of the Donetsk city of Horlivka.

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This report was contributed to by Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv and Frank Bajak in Boston.

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Stay updated on the Ukraine conflict with AP’s reporting at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

Source: wral.com