KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russia carried out one of the most devastating attacks on Ukraine’s power sector on Friday. The airstrike was in retaliation for recent attacks inside Russia, and comes days after President Vladimir Putin hardened his stance and announced a possible sign of an escalation of the war. his seizure of power in preordained elections;
Many Ukrainians were plunged into darkness in several cities, at least five people were killed, and damage to the country’s largest hydroelectric power plant temporarily cut off power from a nuclear power plant that had been a security risk throughout the war. It was cut off.
Russia launched more than 60 exploding drones and 90 missiles in what Ukrainian officials said was the most brutal attack on energy infrastructure since the start of a full-scale war in early 2022. .
Officials said the attack, which hit Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv the hardest, came a day after Russia fired 31 missiles at the Ukrainian capital Kiev.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been asking Western allies for weeks to provide additional air defense systems and ammunition, while $60 billion in aid from the United States has been withheld by parliamentary departments.
“As for Russian missiles, there will be no delays like there were with aid packages for our country,” Zelenskiy said. “It is important to understand the costs of delays and postponing decisions.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry called Friday’s attack a “retaliatory attack.” Ukraine has stepped up artillery shelling of Russia’s Belgorod region along its northeastern border and launched drone strikes targeting Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities.
Ukraine launches drone attack on Russia on final day of presidential electionhttps://t.co/60dWxagBS2
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One person was killed and at least three others injured in the latest Ukrainian airstrike inside Russia on Friday, local officials said.
President Putin described Ukraine’s attacks on Belgorod and other regions as an attempt to frighten the population and derail the highly organized elections that ended on Sunday. And he vowed to fight back.
A day after declaring victory, President Putin said Russia would seek to create a buffer zone in eastern Ukraine to protect against long-range attacks and cross-border raids.
In recent months, Russia has made advances on the battlefield against an exhausted Ukrainian army that is suffering from a lack of manpower and ammunition on a front spanning more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles).
Putin called the 2022 invasion a “special military operation,” and his officials have largely avoided the word “war.” But on Friday, in a change of rhetoric that foreshadowed a new escalation, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a Russian newspaper: “When the Western countries joined this on the side of Ukraine, for us it already became a war.” told.
In the winter of 2022-2023, Russia targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, causing frequent power outages across the country. Although many in Ukraine and the West expected Russia to repeat this strategy this winter, Russia instead focused its attacks on Ukraine’s defense industry.
While launching the attack, Russia combined sophisticated ballistic and cruise missiles with cheap Iranian-made Shahed drones to oversaturate and weaken Ukraine’s air defenses.
Volodymyr Kudritsky, the head of state power company Ukrenergo, said Friday’s barrage was the biggest attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the start of the all-out war.
“This attack was particularly dangerous because the enemy combined a variety of attack methods: kamikaze drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles.”
Russia rains missiles on Kiev in first major attack in six weeks https://t.co/pWI4efdkK1
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 21, 2024
Kudritsky said Russia had “tried to destroy all important energy facilities that provide electricity to the city of Kharkiv,” leaving at least 700,000 people without electricity. He estimated that hundreds of thousands of customers in other areas remain without power.
Oleksiy Kuleba, deputy head of President Zelensky’s office, said the attack left 31 people injured and 200,000 people in the Odessa region without constant access to electricity. He said power supply to most of the 400,000 customers in the Dnipropetrovsk region had been restored.
The massive Dnipro hydroelectric power plant, Ukraine’s largest, has ceased operations after being hit by at least six missiles, causing extensive damage. Ihor Sirota, head of Ukridroenergo, which oversees the country’s hydropower plants, said “significant losses in Ukraine’s energy system” had wiped out about a third of its power generation capacity.
Sirota said the extent of the damage to the power plant remained unclear as equipment from the explosion was buried under concrete and metal debris, adding that repairs would be a “long process”.
The attack caused a fire at the Dnipro nuclear power plant, which supplies Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia. International Atomic Energy Agency Director Rafael Grossi said early Friday that power at the nuclear power plant was lost for several hours and then restored. The Zaporizhzhia factory has been occupied by Russian forces since the beginning of the invasion, and fighting in the vicinity has increased the risk of a nuclear accident.
The country’s hydropower authority said there was no risk of the hydropower plant’s dam bursting. A dam failure would not only disrupt supplies to nuclear power plants, but could also cause severe flooding similar to last year’s collapse when the main dam at Kakhovka, further downstream on the Dnieper, collapsed.
