Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Ukraine power plants struck in Russian attack
AMASSIVE missile and drone attack has destroyed much of one of Ukraine’s largest power plants and damaged others, officials in Ukraine said yesterday.
The Trypilska plant, which was the biggest energy supplier for the Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr provinces, was struck numerous times by a Russian assault, destroying the transformer, turbines and generators and leaving the plant ablaze.
As the first drone approached, workers hid in a shelter which saved their lives, said Andrii Gota, chairman of the supervisory board of Centrenergo, the state company that runs the plant. They watched the plant burn, surrounded by dense smoke and engulfed in flames.
“It’s terrifying,” said Mr Gota. Hours later, rescuers were still dismantling the rubble.
Speaking in Moscow, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin cast the attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities as a response to Ukrainian strikes that targeted Russian oil refineries.
The Trypilska plant supplied electricity to three million customers – but none lost power because the grid was able to compensate since demands are low at this time of year. Still, the consequences of the strikes could be felt in the coming months, as air conditioning use rises during the summer.
At least 10 other strikes overnight damaged energy infrastructure in Kharkiv province. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said more than 200,000 people in the province, which has been struck repeatedly, were without power.
Ukraine’s largest private energy operator, DTEK, described the barrage of strikes as one of the most powerful attacks this year, while Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko told reporters it was a “largescale, enormous, missile attack that affected our energy sector very badly”.
Russia has recently renewed strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities, and attacks last month blacked out large parts of the country – a level of darkness not seen since the first days of the full-scale invasion in 2022. The volume and accuracy of the attacks have alarmed the country’s defenders and left officials scrambling for better ways to protect energy assets.
The Kremlin yesterday said that a draft Russia-Ukraine agreement negotiated in 2022 could serve as a starting point for prospective talks to end the fighting in Ukraine that has dragged into a third year.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that the draft document, which was discussed in Istanbul in
March 2022, could be “the basis for starting negotiations”. At the same time, he noted that the possible future talks would need to take into account the “new realities”.
“There have been many changes since then, new entities have been included in our constitution,” Mr Peskov said in a conference call with reporters. In September 2022, Russia annexed four Ukrainian provinces in a move that Kyiv and its Western allies have rejected as an unlawful.
Mr Peskov’s statement followed President Vladimir Putin’s comments on Thursday, in which he mocked prospective Ukraine peace talks that Switzerland is set to host in June, warning that Moscow will not accept any enforced peace plans.
“We are ready for constructive work, but we wouldn’t accept any attempts to enforce a position that isn’t based on the realities,” Mr Putin said in Moscow.