Russian strikes have hit Ukraine’s southern Odesa region and the city of Dnipro for the first time in weeks, and air raid sirens sounded all across the country amid fears that Moscow had unleashed another large-scale missile attack.
An infrastructure target was hit in the Odesa region, governor Maksym Marchenko said on Telegram, warning of the threat of a “massive missile barrage on the entire territory of Ukraine”.
Multiple explosions were also reported in Dnipro, where two infrastructure objects were damaged and at least one person was wounded, according to the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko.
Air defence systems were operating in the central Kyiv region, governor Oleksiy Kuleba said.
Officials in the Poltava, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions urged residents to stay in bomb shelters amid the threat of missile strikes.
Thursday’s blasts followed the 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 “a naive tactic 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.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he expected the renewal, for at least 120 days, of a UN and Turkish-brokered deal that that has enabled Ukraine to export more than 11 million metric tons of wheat and Russia to ship its grain and fertiliser to world markets.
Mr Zelensky tweeted that the deal “will be prolonged for 120 days”, calling it a “key decision in the global fight against the food crisis”.
Turkish officials said negotiations for the extension of the grain initiative are continuing and an announcement will be make when the talks are concluded.
The United Nations has previously said that it is “cautiously optimistic” that the deal, due to expire on Saturday, will be renewed.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, saw growing food shortages and soaring prices that left millions of people, especially in developing countries, unable to buy enough to eat.
Russia’s UN ambassadors complained last month that more needed to be done to facilitate its exports of grain and fertilisers.
Under the separate agreements with Russia and Ukraine brokered by the UN and Turkey, the deal will be extended for another 120 days when it expires on November 19 unless either Moscow or Kyiv objects.
