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.
LEVERAGE: China did not ‘need to fire a shot’ to deny Taiwan airspace over Africa when it owns ‘half the continent’s debt,’ a US official said, calling it economic warfare The EU has raised concerns about overflight rights following the delay of President William Lai’s (賴清德) planned state visit to the Kingdom of Eswatini after three African nations denied overflight clearance for his charter at the last minute. Taiwanese allies Paraguay and Saint Kitts and Nevis, as well as several US lawmakers and the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) condemned China for allegedly pressuring the countries. Lai was scheduled to fly directly to Taiwan’s only African ally from yesterday to Sunday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of King Mswati III’s accession and his 58th birthday, but Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar suddenly revoked
The number of pet cats in Taiwan surpassed that of pet dogs for the first time last year, reaching 1,742,033, a 32.8 percent increase from 2023, the Ministry of Agriculture said yesterday, citing a survey. By contrast, the number of pet dogs declined slightly by 1.2 percent over the same period to 1,462,528, the ministry said. Despite the shift, households with dogs still slightly outnumber those with cats by 1.2 percent. However, while the number of households with multiple dogs has remained relatively stable, households keeping more than two cats have increased, contributing to the overall rise in the feline population. The trend
China on Wednesday teased in a video an aircraft carrier that could be its fourth, and the first using nuclear power, while making an allusion to Taiwan and vowing to further build up its islands, as it looks to boost maritime power, secure resources and bolster territorial claims. The video, issued on the eve of the 77th founding anniversary of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy, featured fictional officers with names that are homophones of three commissioned aircraft carriers, the Liaoning (遼寧), Shandong (山東) and Fujian (福建). Titled Into the Deep, it showed a 19-year-old named “Hejian” (何劍) joining the group, sparking
BIG YEAR: The company said it would also release its A12 chip the same year to keep a ‘reliable stream of new silicon technologies’ flowing to its customers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said its newest A13 chip is to enter volume production in 2029 as the chipmaker seeks to hold onto its tech leadership and demand for next-generation chips used in artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance-computing (HPC) and mobile applications. TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, also unveiled its A12 chip at its annual technology symposium in Santa Clara, California. The A12 chip, which features TSMC’s super-power-rail technology to provide backside power delivery for AI and HPC applications, is also to enter volume production in 2029, a year after the scheduled release of the A14 chip. The technology moves
RSS