10m without power in Ukraine as Russia launches new airstrikes on homes and power facilities

Ten million people are without power in Ukraine after Russian airstrikes inflicted more damage on Thursday with the latest barrage smashing into energy infrastructure, apartment buildings and an industrial site.

In his nightly video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the widespread outages were affecting people in the Kyiv, Odesa, Sumy and Vinnytsia regions.

At least four people were killed and more than a dozen wounded in drone and missile strikes around the country, authorities said.

With the Kremlin’s forces on the ground being pushed back, Russia has increasingly resorted in recent weeks to aerial onslaughts aimed at energy infrastructure in parts of Ukraine it does not hold.

In Kyiv, the city’s military administration said air defences shot down at least two cruise missiles and five exploding drones.

Ukrainian air defences this week appear to have had far higher rates of successful shootdowns than during previous barrages, analysts say, partly due to Western-supplied weapons systems.

The Russian strikes hit Dnipro and Ukraine’s southern Odesa region for the first time in weeks.

Valentyn Reznichenko, governor of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, said a large fire erupted in Dnipro after the strikes hit an industrial target.

The attack wounded at least 23 people, including a teenage girl, and all were being treated in city hospitals, Mr Reznichenko said.

Earlier, Mr Zelensky posted on Telegram a video that he said was one of the blasts in Dnipro. The video from a vehicle dashcam shows a fiery blast engulfing a rainy road.

“This is another confirmation from Dnipro of how terrorists want peace,” he wrote. “The peaceful city and people’s wish to live their accustomed lives. Going to work, to their affairs. A rocket attack!”

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Elsewhere, a Russian strike that hit a residential building killed at least four people overnight in Vilnia in the Zaporizhzhia region. Rescuers were combing the rubble for other victims, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a senior official in the Ukrainian presidential office.

In the northeast of the country, critical infrastructure was also hit in the Kharkiv region, in the area of Izyum, wounding three workers, the regional administration said.

Borys Filatov, the mayor of Dnipro, said in a Facebook post that one of his staff was among the wounded and showed a photo of what he said was her coat pierced by a piece of shrapnel.

An infrastructure target was hit in Odesa, the region’s governor Maksym Marchenko said on Telegram, warning of the threat of a “massive missile barrage on the entire territory of Ukraine”.

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Officials in the Poltava, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions urged residents to stay in bomb shelters.

Thursday’s blasts followed a huge barrage of Russian strikes on Tuesday, the biggest attack to date on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure that also resulted in a missile hitting Poland.

Russia has increasingly resorted to targeting Ukraine’s power grid as winter approaches as its battlefield losses mount.

The most recent barrage followed days of euphoria in Ukraine sparked by one of its biggest military successes – the retaking last week of the southern city of Kherson.

The head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, called the strikes on energy targets “naive tactics of cowardly losers” in a Telegram post on Thursday.

“Ukraine has already withstood extremely difficult strikes by the enemy, which did not lead to results the Russian cowards hoped for,” he wrote, urging Ukrainians not to ignore air raid sirens.

Separately, the United Nations announced the extension of a deal to ensure exports of grain and fertilisers from Ukraine that were disrupted by the war.

The deal was set to expire soon, renewing fears of a global food crisis if exports were blocked from one of the world’s largest grain producers.

Associated Press