October 18, 2022, 9:05 AM
October 18, 2022, 9:05 AM
Ukraine warned of a ‘critical situation’ after Russian attacks destroyed 30% of power plants in just over a week of the country, where new bombardments once again caused electricity cuts in the territory. The Russian army, for its part, confirmed having bombed Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
“The situation is currently critical throughout the country, because our regions depend on each other,” declared a person in charge of the presidency, Kirilo Timochenko, to the television.
The latest wave of Russian bombardment this morning hit several energy facilities in the country for the second day in a row, causing electricity and water cuts.
In kyiv, the capital, at least two people died after a missile attack against a city power supply facility, according to the prosecution.
*But the bombardments also reached the city of Kharkov, in the east, Mikolaiv, in the south, and the regions of Dnipro and Zhitomir, in the center.
“Since October 10, 30% of Ukrainian plants have been destroyed, leading to massive outages across the country,” Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski said on Twitter.
On Monday, Russia attacked the center of kyiv with “suicide drones”, which the Ukrainian authorities considered an act of “desperation” on the part of Moscow. One of the bombings destroyed a residential building and five people were killed.
It was the second Monday in a row that Russia launched attacks and military experts see it as a response to setbacks suffered by Moscow on the battlefield.
After Tuesday’s attacks, Zelensky reiterated his refusal to negotiate with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The intention of the Russian forces, he denounced, is “to terrorize and kill civilians.”
Several towns in the Zhytomyr region, west of kyiv, and in the city of Dnipro in the center of the country, were left without electricity.
“The city has neither electricity nor water,” warned the mayor of Zhitomir, Sergei Sujomlin. “Hospitals run on backup power,” he added on Facebook.
In Mikolaiv, which suffered attacks at dawn, the authorities managed to restore the network.
And in Kharkov, the second Ukrainian city located in the northeast, eight missiles hit the city, according to the regional governor.
The attacks hit “one of the city’s industrial enterprises,” its mayor Igor Terekhov reported on Telegram.
In kyiv, operator DTEK said its employees were making “all necessary efforts to restore supply” of electricity.
