Russia bombs Ukrainian energy facilities in latest ‘mass attack’

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ADDS Russian Defense Ministry, four dead in Donetsk

Russian attacks damaged a Ukrainian nuclear power plant and several energy facilities overnight, Kiev said on Thursday. This is the latest in a series of bombings that have pushed Ukraine’s power grid to its limits.

In the eastern Donetsk region, four civilians were killed and four others injured in separate attacks by Russian cluster munitions and glide bombs, the regional governor said.

In recent months, targeted missile and drone attacks have crippled Ukraine’s power generation capacity, forcing Kyiv to impose power outages and import supplies from EU countries.

“The enemy attacked a number of energy infrastructure facilities,” the Energy Ministry said, adding that Russian missiles targeted sites in four regions, including near Kyiv.

AFP journalists in the capital heard air raid sirens blaring over Kyiv in the early hours of Thursday.

Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said the attacks had caused “serious damage” to one of its power plants, but did not disclose where the plant was located.

“This is the seventh mass attack on the company’s thermal power plant in the last three months,” the company said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the barrage had halved the war-torn country’s electricity generation capacity compared to the previous year.

He called on Ukraine’s allies to send more air defense systems to protect the country’s vital infrastructure.

DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko joined calls for more military aid, saying the power plant hit early Thursday had already been damaged in an earlier attack.

“We must urgently close our airspace, otherwise Ukraine faces a serious crisis this winter. I ask the allies to help us defend our energy system and rebuild it in time,” he said.

The Kremlin initially made no comment on the latest attack, but Moscow stressed that its forces were not targeting civilian infrastructure.

However, the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that it had carried out “precision strikes” on energy facilities used for military production in response to Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil facilities.

In the wake of the latest Ukrainian attack on Russian territory, the governor of the Krasnodar region – near the Russian-occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea – announced that a woman had been killed in a drone attack on oil facilities.

The affected areas included the city of Slavyansk-on-Kuban in Krasnodar Region, where the woman was killed, Governor Veniamin Kondratiev said.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it had shot down 15 Ukrainian drones that also attacked oil fields in the southern republic of Adygea and the Tambov region.

A source in the Ukrainian security service told AFP that drones belonging to the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) were behind the attacks in the two Russian regions.

“These facilities processed and stored raw materials and finished products that were later used by the Russian army,” the source said, announcing further attacks on Russian oil facilities to empty the Kremlin’s war chest.

The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia had fired nine missiles and 27 Iranian-made attack drones and that air defense systems had shot down all but four missiles.

It was said that air defense systems had also been activated in the regions of Zaporizhia, Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkiv and Kyiv, among others.

The Energy Ministry said that a total of seven energy plant employees were injured and that more than 200,000 people in the Vinnytsia region were temporarily cut off from electricity.

“There will be no outages at critical infrastructure companies,” it continued.

Meanwhile, Russia has stepped up its deadly artillery attacks on contested frontline areas in southern and eastern Ukraine.

The governor of the southern Kherson region announced on Thursday morning that two people were killed and three injured in the latest Russian attacks.

In Kharkiv, a northeastern region where Russia recently launched a surprise ground offensive, the governor said a woman was killed by Russian fire.

And two people had already been killed in the Donetsk region, the governor said, one of them in the frontline city of Toretsk, where Russian forces have gained ground after a long lull in fighting.

The Ukrainian military said Russian forces were trying to expel troops from the nearby villages of Shumy and New York.