Ukraine has denounced “massive” Russian missile attacks that killed three people and caused extensive damage to its energy infrastructure on Thursday morning, leading to further massive power outages on the eve of the New Year holidays.
• Also read: [EN IMAGES] How the Ukrainians shoot down a Russian missile
• Also read: Putin launches new ships and promotes his fleet
• Also read: Russia: Air defenses activated near military base 500km from Ukraine
These strikes resulted in “3 dead and 6 injured, including a child,” Ukrainian Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi told local television on Thursday evening.
In the context of the bombing and the activation of Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses, Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally, claims to have shot down an S300 anti-aircraft missile over its territory, coming “from Ukrainian territory”.
Belarusian authorities have released images of fragments falling in a field in the Brest region, near the village of Gorbakha in the south-west of the country. They urged the Ukrainian ambassador to protest and call for an investigation.
Ukraine replied in the evening that it did not rule out a “deliberate provocation” by Russia, which aimed its cruise missiles in such a way that their interception over Belarus would “engage Belarus in its war”.
According to the Ukrainian army, 54 of the 69 cruise missiles launched by Russia were shot down, along with 11 Iranian-made Shahed IEDs.
But the shots that hit their targets caused further damage to a power grid across the country already badly damaged by nearly three months of such bombing.
Significant damage
“Unfortunately, due to significant network damage, it is difficult for us to supply the Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Lviv regions with electricity,” complained the head of the operator Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kudrytsky, on Ukrainian television.
But “the enemy has not achieved its goal: the system is working” and “a part is (already) restored,” he added.
Power outages have multiplied across the country, while millions of Ukrainian civilians have been living with severely rationed electricity and problems with running water and heating for weeks in the dead of winter.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kouleba condemned strikes against “peaceful Ukrainian cities just before the New Year” as “nonsensical barbarism”.
The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, blasted an attack on Twitter that “indiscriminately destroyed medical infrastructure and facilities, targeted and killed civilians”.
In the Kharkiv region (east), “a 50-year-old man” was killed by Russian fire, according to Governor Oleg Synegoubov.
“We have to persevere”
After a series of military setbacks on the ground in late summer and autumn, the Kremlin changed course and began regularly attacking Ukraine’s transformers and power plants in October.
“We have to persevere, it’s war, we have to survive and win,” Iryna Ivaneyko, a tram driver in Lviv, the major city in western Ukraine, told AFP without power. In the region of the same name, 282 towns were without electricity.
In Kyiv, 40% of residents were without electricity during the day.
According to a military official, anti-aircraft defenses managed to shoot down all 16 missiles aimed at the capital. But debris fell on homes and a playground, injuring three, including a 14-year-old girl, according to city officials.
Half a dozen houses were damaged in the Bortnychi district, according to an AFP journalist. In one street there were mountains of cables, boards and bricks.
In Odessa, a major port in the southwest, 21 missiles were shot down by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses, according to Governor Maksym Marchenko. But others have hit their target and caused blackouts again.
Determined Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin justified this tactic of mass strikes affecting millions of civilians in early December in response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructure.
He also always portrays his costly invasion of Ukraine, which lasted more than 10 months, as a “necessity” and assures that the West is using the Ukraine as a bridgehead to threaten Russia.
Russian diplomatic chief Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that the war in Ukraine was “prepared by the West.”
Fighting rages on on the ground, with a particularly bloody battle over Bakhmout, an eastern city Russia has been attempting to capture for months, and Kreminna, which Ukrainian forces are seeking to recapture.
Kherson, a major southern city from which Russian forces fled on November 11, is now the target of almost daily Russian attacks.
In Russia, according to regional authorities, the air defense shot down a drone in the area of the main Engels military base on Thursday. According to Moscow, Engels, 500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, was hit by a deadly drone attack attributed to Ukraine on Monday.