Critical infrastructure across Ukraine was hit by more than a dozen Russian missiles on Saturday, the Ukrainian Air Force said, with several regions reporting attacks on power facilities and power outages.
Ukraine’s air force command reported that 33 missiles were fired at Ukraine on Saturday morning, and that 18 of them were shot down.
Since October 10, Russia has launched a series of devastating salvos on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which have hit at least half of its thermal power generation and up to 40% of the entire system.
Shortly after dawn on Saturday, local authorities in regions of Ukraine began reporting strikes at power installations and power outages as engineers scrambled to restore the crumbling grid.
Governors have advised residents to stock up on water in the event of a power outage. Presidential adviser Kyrylo Tymoshenko said that as of Saturday afternoon, more than a million people across Ukraine were without power, with 672,000 of them in the western Khmelnytskyi region alone.
After the first wave of missiles hit early in the morning, air raid sirens sounded again across the country at 11:15 am local time. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Moscow wanted to create a new wave of refugees in Europe with the attacks, while Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said they constituted genocide.
“Deliberate attacks on Ukraine’s critical civilian infrastructure are part of Russia’s genocide of Ukrainians,” Kuleba wrote on Twitter. Moscow acknowledged targeting energy infrastructure but denies targeting civilians.
State-owned grid operator Ukrenergo said the attacks had hit transmission infrastructure in western Ukraine, but that power supply restrictions were being implemented in 10 regions across the country, including the capital Kyiv.
“The scale of damage is comparable to or may exceed the consequences of the attacks (between) 10 and 12 October,” Ukrenergo wrote on the Telegram app, referring to the first wave of attacks on Ukraine’s power system last week.
Meanwhile, deputy Kyiv city administration chief Petro Panteleev warned that Russian attacks could leave Ukraine’s capital without power and heat for “several days or weeks”. “That possibility exists… we have to understand and remember it,” he told Ukrainian newspaper Ekonomichna Pravda.
Source: CNN Brasil
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