RUSSIAN STRIKES ON UKRAINE POWER GRID KILLS FOUR
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Russian missile and drone strikes hit Ukraine’s power grid on Monday, killing at least four people and forcing officials to implement emergency blackouts.
Officials claimed 15 districts around the country were targeted in the aerial bombardment, which began overnight and was the largest in weeks.
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The strikes come as Ukraine launches a major cross-border offensive into Russia’s Kursk area, where it has been fighting for nearly three weeks and claimed to be advancing on Sunday.
“Russian terrorists have once again targeted energy infrastructure. Unfortunately, there is damage in a number of regions,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said.
Ukrenergo, the state-owned energy system operator, was compelled to implement emergency power cuts to stabilise the system after the barrage, while train schedules were delayed.
Explosions from what seemed to be air defences could be heard in Kyiv early Monday, and inhabitants hurried to metro stations for refuge, according to AFP journalists.
“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,” she said.
The Russian military ministry stated that it had targeted energy infrastructure used to support Ukraine’s defence sector.
Since its invasion in February 2022, Russia has undertaken a series of large-scale drone and missile operations on Ukraine, including severe attacks on energy infrastructure.
The attacks on Monday killed four people and injured over a dozen others around the country, according to officials.
Sergiy Lysak, governor of the central Dnipropetrovsk area, claimed Russian forces had assaulted “en masse.”
“There is one dead, a 69-year-old man,” the governor wrote on social media.
The strike in southern Zaporizhzhia killed one person, according to local governor Ivan Fedorov.
According to Lutsk mayor Igor Polishchuk, a Russian shelling damaged an apartment block and an infrastructure site, killing one person and injuring five others.
In the central region of Zhytomyr, one person was killed and several others injured, according to authorities.
Russia also attacked railway infrastructure in the northern Sumy region, injuring one person and causing property damage, according to national operator Ukrainian Railways.
“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.
The attack targeted energy facilities across the country, including the southern Odesa region, the wider Kyiv region and the region of Lviv in the west of the country, authorities said.
“As a result, there are partial power outages in (the city of) Lviv and the region,” governor Maksym Kozytskyi said on social media.
A missile strike on the southern Odesa area wounded four people, including a 10-year-old boy, according to Governor Oleg Kiper.
“Massive rocket fire” injured three more persons in Mykolaiv, the adjoining southern district, according to governor Vitaliy Kim.
Earlier, an attack on an industrial plant in the eastern region of Poltava injured five people, according to governor Filip Pronin.
“The enemy is once again terrorising the whole of Ukraine with missiles. The energy sector is in the crosshairs,” energy minister German Galushchenko said.
Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’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 meanwhile said one resident had been killed on Monday 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 advisor working for the Reuters news agency was killed in a missile strike on a hotel in eastern Ukraine late Saturday.
“For all this, the world must not stop putting pressure on the terrorist state,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said following the strike, referring to Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Zelensky separately announced on Sunday his forces were advancing in the Russian region of Kursk, more than two weeks after Kyiv’s surprise incursion.
AFP
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