Russian missile and drone strikes battered Ukraine’s power grid yesterday, killing at least four people and forcing authorities to introduce emergency blackouts.
Officials said 15 regions across the nation were targeted in the aerial assault which began during the night and was the biggest in weeks.
The attacks come as Ukraine presses a major cross-border offensive into Russia’s Kursk region, where Kyiv has been battling for nearly three weeks and claimed on Sunday to be advancing.
Photo: AFP / HO / Ukrainian Emergency Service
“Russian terrorists have once again targeted energy infrastructure. Unfortunately, there is damage in a number of regions,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said.
State-owned electricity system operator Ukrenergo was forced to introduce emergency power cuts to stabilize the system following the barrage, while train schedules were disrupted.
Explosions from what appeared to be air defenses could be heard in the capital, Kyiv, early yesterday, while residents rushed to take shelter in metro stations.
“We are always worried. We have been under stress for almost three years now,” said 34-year-old lawyer Yulia Voloshyna, who was taking shelter in the Kyiv metro. “It was very scary, to be honest. You don’t know what to expect.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense said it had struck energy infrastructure used to support Ukraine’s defense industry.
Since invading in February 2022, Russia has launched repeated large-scale drone and missile attacks on Ukraine, including punishing attacks on energy facilities.
The attacks yesterday killed four people and wounded more than a dozen, officials said.
The governor of the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said Russian forces had attacked “en masse.”
“There is one dead, a 69-year-old man,” Lysak wrote on social media.
In southern Zaporizhzhia region, the attack killed one civilian, local governor Ivan Fedorov said.
In the western city of Lutsk, Russian bombardment damaged an apartment building and an infrastructure facility, killing one person and injuring five others, Lutsk Mayor Igor Polishchuk said.
In the central region of Zhytomyr, one person was killed and several others were wounded, authorities said.
Russia also attacked railway infrastructure in the northern Sumy region, injuring a man and damaging buildings, national operator Ukrainian Railways said.
“Some railway stations, which were also cut off from power due to the outage in the city’s networks, have been switched to backup generators,” it said.
Four people were wounded in a missile attack on the southern Odesa region, including a 10-year-old boy, governor Oleg Kiper said.
In the neighboring southern region of Mykolaiv, “massive rocket fire” wounded three other people, governor Vitaliy Kim said.
Earlier, an attack on an industrial facility in the eastern region of Poltava wounded five people, governor Filip Pronin said.
“The enemy is once again terrorizing the whole of Ukraine with missiles. The energy sector is in the crosshairs,” Ukrainian Minister of Energy German Galushchenko said.
Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, said the attack showed Kyiv needed permission to strike “deep into the territory of Russia with Western weapons.”
Authorities in the eastern Kharkiv region said that one resident had been killed yesterday morning by Russian rocket fire, but it was not immediately clear whether that incident was part of the missile and drone barrage.
The aerial barrage came after a safety adviser working for the Reuters news agency was killed in a missile strike on a hotel in eastern Ukraine late on Saturday.
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