Ukraine yesterday said Russia had launched a “massive” overnight attack on energy infrastructure in the country’s west and south.
Russia fired 16 missiles and 13 Shahed drones at energy facilities and critical infrastructure, the Ukrainian Air Force said.
Ukraine’s air defenses intercepted 12 of the 16 missiles and all 13 drones, the air force said.
Photo: Reuters
“Equipment at [operator] Ukrenergo facilities in Zaporizhzhia and Lviv regions was damaged,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy said, adding that two employees were wounded and hospitalized in Zaporizhzhia.
It said this was “the eighth massive, combined attack on energy infrastructure facilities” in the past three months.
Targeted missile and drone attacks have crippled Ukraine’s electricity generation capacity and forced Kyiv to impose blackouts and import supplies from the EU.
Ukrainian authorities on Thursday said that energy infrastructure, including a power station, had been damaged in a major overnight attack which left seven employees wounded.
DTEK, the largest private energy company in Ukraine, said the strikes caused “serious damage” at one of its plants.
Russian attacks have destroyed half of Ukraine’s energy capacity, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
This week, he said that all hospitals and schools in Ukraine must be equipped with solar panels “as soon as possible.”
“We are doing everything to ensure that Russian attempts to blackmail us on heat and electricity fail,” he said on Thursday.
DTEK chief executive Maxim Timchenko said that Ukraine “faces a serious crisis this winter” if the country’s Western allies do not provide military aid to defend the energy network.
Moscow’s overnight attack on Zaporizhzhia and Lviv followed Ukrainian military strikes on three oil refineries in southern Russia overnight into Friday.
In other developments, the governor of eastern Ukraine’s partly occupied Donetsk Oblast yesterday said that Russian attacks had killed five people and wounded a further seven the previous day.
A policeman was killed in the partly occupied region of Kherson by a drone attack on a checkpoint, the Ukrainian National Police said.
Additional reporting by AP
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