Ukraine is hit by barrage of airstrikes

RUSSIAN airstrikes targeting energy facilities rocked much of Ukraine yesterday, causing many power blackouts.

A senior Ukrainian official warned that the situation was “critical” and urged the country’s citizens to “hang in there”, as neighbourhoods went dark.

The aerial assault, which resulted in at least one death in a residential building in the capital, Kyiv, followed days of euphoria in Ukraine, sparked by one of its biggest military successes in the nearly nine-month war – the retaking last week of the Ukrainian city of Kherson.

At least a dozen provinces reported strikes, which caused multiple emergency blackouts. A Ukrainian air force spokesman said Russia fired around 100 missiles. President Volodymyr Zelensky put the number at 85.

Mr Zelensky warned that more attacks may be coming but defiantly vowed, with a shake of his fist: “We will survive everything.”

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the office of Ukraine’s president, said the barrage was “another planned attack on energy infrastructure facilities”.

“Most of the hits were recorded in the centre and in the north of the country. In the capital, the situation is very difficult,” he wrote on social media.

As its battlefield losses mount, Russia has in recent months increasingly resorted to targeting Ukraine’s power grid, seemingly hoping to turn the approach of winter into a weapon by leaving people in the cold and dark.

While city after city reported attacks, Mr Tymoshenko appealed to Ukrainians to hang on and acknowledged the severity of the situation.

Officials reported strikes in Lviv, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne in the west of the country, and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in the northeast. Several missile strikes also hit Kryvyi Rih, Mr Zelensky’s home city, according to its mayor, Oleksandr Vilkul.

In Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said authorities found a body in one of three residential buildings that were struck in the capital, where emergency blackouts were also announced.

Video footage showed a fivestorey, apparently residential, building in Kyiv on fire, with flames licking through apartments. Mr Klitschko said the city’s air defence units had shot down some missiles.

The retaking of Kherson was one of Ukraine’s biggest successes in the nearly nine-month-old Russian invasion, and dealt a stinging blow to the Kremlin.

However, large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine remain under Russian control, and fighting continues.