Air strikes have cut power and water supplies to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as part of a Russian campaign to leave the nation cold and dark this winter, Ukraine’s president has said.
Volodymyr Zelensky said nearly one third of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed in the past week, “causing massive blackouts across the country”.
“No space left for negotiations with Putin’s regime,” he tweeted.
Another kind of Russian terrorist attacks: targeting 🇺🇦 energy & critical infrastructure. Since Oct 10, 30% of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed, causing massive blackouts across the country. No space left for negotiations with Putin's regime. @United24media pic.twitter.com/LN4A2GYgCK
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 18, 2022
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Depriving people of water, electricity and heating as winter begins to bite and the broadening use of so-called suicide drones that nosedive into targets have opened a new phase in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war.
The aerial bombardments appear aimed at wearing down the resilience Ukrainians have shown in the nearly eight months since Russia invaded.
Even far from front lines, basic utilities are no longer certainties, with daily strikes reaching far into the country and damaging key facilities, sometimes faster than they can be repaired.
The latest city to lose power and water entirely was Zhytomyr, home to military bases, industries, leafy boulevards and about 250,000 people, 85 miles west of Kyiv.
The city’s hospitals switched to back-up power after the double missile strike on Tuesday on an energy facility, and other settlements in the area also lost electricity.
In Kyiv, missile strikes damaged two power facilities and killed two people, city authorities said. The attack left 50,000 people without power.
Missiles also severely damaged an energy facility in the south-central city of Dnipro.
As well as missiles, Russia is mixing up its modes of attack.
Suicide drones — so-called because they slam into targets and explode — set ablaze an infrastructure facility in the partly Russian-occupied southern Zaporizhzhia region, the regional governor said.
Air-defence S-300 missiles that Russia has been repurposing as ground-attack weapons as its stocks are being depleted were used to strike the southern city of Mykolaiv, killing a man whose body was found in the debris of a two-storey building, the region’s governor said.
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, rockets were used to hit an industrial area. The regional governor said the eight rockets were fired from across the nearby border with Russia.
Waves of explosives-laden suicide drones also struck Kyiv on Monday, hitting energy facilities and setting ablaze and partly collapsing buildings. One drone slammed into a four-storey residential building, killing four people.
Ukraine says Russia is getting thousands of drones from Iran. The Iranian-made Shahed drones that nose-dived with their explosive charges into targets in Kyiv on Monday have also been widely used elsewhere in recent weeks.
In the past week alone, more than 100 of the drones have slammed into power plants, sewage treatment plants, residential buildings, bridges and other targets in urban areas, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said.
In a televised address on Monday night, Mr Zelensky said Russia is using kamikaze drones because it is losing the war, now nearing its eighth full month.
“Russia doesn’t have any chance on the battlefield, and it tries to compensate for its military defeats with terror,” he said. “Why this terror? To put pressure on us, on Europe, on the entire world.”
