Another wave of Russian air strikes killed at least four people and knocked out electricity and water supplies in several Ukrainian cities as Kyiv said almost a third of the country’s power stations had been destroyed in recent missile and drone attacks.
Officials called on Ukrainians to use less electricity and water as blackouts hit several areas, including the capital Kyiv — where three people were killed in a missile strike — to the west in Zhytomyr region, in the eastern city of Dnipro and in the southern city of Mykolaiv, where at least one man was killed when a missile smashed into an apartment block.
“Another kind of Russian terrorist attacks: targeting Ukrainian energy and critical infrastructure,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
“Since Oct 10th, 30 per cent of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed, causing massive blackouts across the country. No space left for negotiations with [Russia’s] regime,” he added.
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Kyiv mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said three workers were killed when two critical infrastructure sites in the city were badly damaged in missile strikes, a day after five people were killed when an explosive-laden drone hit an apartment building near the city centre.
“Currently, electricity and water supplies are partially limited in many residential buildings on the left bank of the capital,” he said, referring to districts on one side of the Dnieper river that bisects Kyiv, where metro and tram services were also disrupted.
“I appeal to all Kyiv residents to reduce electricity use as much as possible. Do not turn on powerful electrical appliances — air conditioners, electric kettles, microwave ovens, etc,” he said on social media, while also urging residents to cut water use if pressure was low in their homes and to stock up on water when possible in preparation for future supply problems.
Russia’s defence ministry said its military “continued to strike Ukraine’s military command and energy systems, as well as depots of foreign-made ammunition and weapons. All designated targets were hit.”
Ukraine and its allies accuse Russia of committing war crimes by deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure, and Kyiv and Washington say Moscow’s forces are using explosive “kamikaze” drones bought from Iran, which are relatively cheap, small and low-flying — which makes them economical to use and hard to detect and shoot down.
Military experts say Russia is mostly using a drone with a 50kg explosive payload called the Shahed-136, which Moscow has renamed the Geran-2.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted on Tuesday that he “did not have information” about the use of Iranian drones: “Russian equipment is used ... with Russian names,” he said.
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Russia is also attacking Ukrainian cities with missiles launched from land, sea and air, and on Monday evening at least 13 people were killed in the Russian city of Yeysk when a military jet crashed into their apartment block, apparently due to a malfunction.
Kyiv and western states say Russia is targeting Ukrainian infrastructure to terrorise civilians and cripple the power grid before winter, and to distract from its recent loss of thousands of square kilometres of territory that it had occupied in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Russian troops still control the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine — the biggest such site in Europe — and Ukrainian officials have accused them of detaining two senior managers at the facility and taking them “to an unknown destination”. The plant, which has been damaged by shelling, is again receiving power from the national grid after back-up diesel generators kicked in briefly on Monday.
