President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed Tuesday that Ukraine would react quickly with a “strong response” if Moscow were to strike the capital, Kyiv, a show of defiance as officials warn of possible attacks timed to the country’s Independence Day holiday.
American intelligence agencies believe Russia is likely to increase its efforts to hit civilian infrastructure and government buildings in Ukraine with the war about to enter its seventh month and Ukraine’s national holiday on Wednesday, the State Department and other U.S. officials said.
“The Department of State has information that Russia is stepping up efforts to launch strikes against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and government facilities in the coming days,” the department said in a Monday alert that was declassified to ensure that officials’ concerns about the threat received a broad audience.
Asked at a news conference what Ukraine would do if Kyiv came under attack ahead of Independence Day, Mr. Zelensky said it would respond as it does if any other city is hit. “If they attack us, they will receive a response, a strong response,” he said after a meeting with visiting Polish President Andrzej Duda in Kyiv.
Ukrainian and American officials have been concerned about the possibility of intensified Russian missile attacks, potentially timed to Independence Day on Wednesday and in response to a string of assaults on Russian military targets in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
Ukraine has been waging a series of hit-and-run attacks on Russian targets in occupied areas. Officials said on Monday that its forces had used precision missiles to halt Russian repairs on a key supply bridge in the occupied region of Kherson in the south. And in the east, Ukrainian forces shelled a building housing the local administrative headquarters of separatist leader, Denis Pushilin, the Russian state news agency TASS reported on Tuesday. Ukraine’s border agency confirmed the strike, and said Mr. Pushilin was uninjured.
Across Ukraine, security is being tightened. Officers are fanning out on the streets. Big celebrations have been banned, and people have been urged to pay special attention to air-raid sirens.
And there is another worry: that Russia may use the milestone to start show trials. Videos have emerged of iron cages being built on the stage of the philharmonic theater in Mariupol, a battered city occupied by the Russians. The fear is that as Ukraine celebrates its decades of self-rule, the Russians will try Ukrainian prisoners of war there as terrorists.
“Our enemy is insidious,” said a statement from the Ukrainian National Police. “It can deliver painful blows precisely on the days of the most important national holiday — the Independence Day of Ukraine.”
Mick Mulroy, a former C.I.A. officer and Pentagon official, said he expected Russia to aim for targets in Kyiv, potentially using the killing of Daria Dugina in a car bombing outside Moscow on Saturday to justify the strikes. Ms. Dugina, 29, was the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a political theorist who has provided the intellectual framework for President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The mood in Kyiv on Monday was largely somber. The city has rebounded since Russian forces withdrew from its outskirts a little more than a month into the war. The streets are full of people mingling with friends, going to work, taking strolls in the sunshine. But with war still raging in the country’s south and the east, the sense of normalcy is fragile.
Pavlo Shetemet, a government clerk, said he planned to work from home on Independence Day and might head to the beach, as he did on Monday. He chatted with friends and watched children splashing around an emerald-green lagoon off the Dnipro River, not far from the center of town.
“A lot of people are talking about possible attacks,” said Mr. Shetemet. “Me, personally? I don’t think the Russians will do that on Independence Day. It’s too obvious. It’s too stupid.”
He stared out at the lagoon’s gentle waves. “It will be O.K., I think,” he said. “But it won’t be normal.”
