PARIS, Oct 10 (AFP) - With Russia firing a hail of missiles into Ukraine on Monday (Oct 10) and Belarus making fresh threats against Kyiv, President Vladimir Putin is seeking to escalate the nearly eight-month war and compensate for humiliating recent losses, Western analysts say.

According to Ukrainian authorities, 41 out of 75 missiles were intercepted, but the remainder struck cities around the country, including the capital Kyiv and western Lviv near the border with Poland.

Putin warned Ukraine he was ready to authorise more "severe" attacks, while deputy head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said that "the first episode has been played. There will be others".

UN chief Antonio Guterres condemned the strikes as "another unacceptable escalation" while French leader Emmanuel Macron called them "a profound change in the nature of this war".

Analysts said the strikes appeared to be a response to a blast on Saturday on the Kerch bridge linking the occupied Crimea peninsula to Russia which was personally inaugurated by Putin in 2018.

Yordan Bozhilov, director of Bulgarian think-tank Sofia Security Forum, called the explosion that downed one of the road sections "the first personal humiliation for Putin".

The attack - not claimed by Ukraine but immediately blamed on Kyiv by Russia - came after major battlefield reverses for Russian troops around Lyman in northeast Ukraine and Kherson in the south in recent weeks.

"Russia demonstrated that it can still escalate the conflict but it can only escalate by attacking more and more civilian targets," said Wojciech Lorenz, head of the international security programme at the Polish Institute of International Affairs.

"The Russian regime was under pressure from its own propagandists and some opinion makers to demonstrate that it was able to respond to Ukrainian offensives," he told AFP.