Ukraine yesterday warned of an emerging “critical” risk to its power grid after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that repeated Russian bombardments had destroyed one-third of the nation’s power facilities as winter approaches.
That warning came as Russian forces claimed to have retaken territory from Ukrainian troops in the eastern Kharkiv region, Moscow’s first announced capture of a village there since being nearly entirely pushed out of the region last month.
At the same time, Russian attacks rocked energy facilities in Kyiv and urban centers across the nation, causing blackouts and disrupting water supplies, just one day after the capital was bombarded with a swarm of suicide drones.
Photo: AFP
“The situation is critical now across the country because our regions are dependent on one another... It’s necessary for the whole country to prepare for electricity, water and heating outages,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told Ukrainian television.
The strikes in the early hours yesterday hit Kyiv, Kharkiv in the east, Mykolaiv in the south, and central regions of Dnipro and Zhytomyr, where officials said hospitals were running on backup generators.
Drones also bombarded Kyiv on Monday leaving five dead, officials said, in what the presidency described as an attack of desperation.
Photo: AFP
It was the second Monday in a row that Russia launched punitive strikes which military observers have said appear to be Moscow’s response to battlefield losses.
Zelenskiy described the repeated targeting of energy infrastructure as “another kind of Russian terrorist attacks.”
“Since October 10, 30 percent of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed, causing massive blackouts across the country,” he wrote on Twitter.
He said the attack meant that there was “no space left for negotiations with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s regime.”
Following the wave of kamikaze drone attacks against Kyiv on Monday, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba demanded EU sanctions on Iran, accusing Tehran of providing Russia with drones.
The Kremlin yesterday said that it has no knowledge of its army using Iranian drones in Ukraine.
“Russian tech is being used,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, referring other questions to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Separately, Russia yesterday said a “technical malfunction” probably caused a Russian warplane to crash into a block of flats in Yeysk, near Ukraine, killing at least 13 people, including three children.
Investigators said they were questioning the pilots of the Sukhoi Su-34, who managed to parachute out of the plane before it crashed on Monday into the nine-story building, engulfing it in flames.
Nineteen people were injured, four of them critically.
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