Russia launched dozens of cruise missiles at critical infrastructure and other targets across Ukraine on Monday morning, Ukrainian officials said, knocking out power and cutting off the water supply in most of the capital city.
Ukraine’s Air Force said it had shot down 44 out of more than 50 missiles fired from the Caspian Sea and the Rostov region of western Russia. The claim could not be immediately verified.
Debris from one of the intercepted missiles landed in the territory of Moldova, along Ukraine’s western border, Moldovan officials said. Sergiu Diaconu, Moldova’s deputy interior minister, said there were no injuries.
An official at Ukraine’s national energy utility, Ukrenergo, said that power stations appeared again to be a primary target as Moscow continued to attempt to cripple Ukraine’s energy grid.
It was not immediately clear how many missiles hit their targets.
“Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure are terrorism and an attempt to freeze millions of civilians,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, tweeted. “They want to leave people with no light, water and sewage — in winter, in the cold.”
Strikes in the capital left 80 per cent of residents without water, according to Kyiv’s water utility. Traffic lights across the city were out on Monday morning after the explosions. A road to a hydroelectric station travelled by a reporter was blocked, and cordoned off by soldiers.
Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said that engineers were working to restore the electricity supply after an energy facility that provides power to about 350,000 apartments in Kyiv was damaged.
Officials around the country said more missiles were expected and urged people to heed air alert sirens.
By late morning, the extent of the damage did not appear to be as severe as in the barrage of missile and drone strikes Russia launched at Kyiv and other cities on Oct. 10, which destroyed 30 per cent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. But officials in several regions reported attacks.
Strikes hit infrastructure facilities in the central Ukrainian cities of Dnipro and Pavlograd, causing “serious destruction”, the head of the regional military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko, wrote on Telegram.
An energy facility in the central Kirovohrad region and critical infrastructure in the western Chernivtsi region also were hit, local officials said.
Serhii Borzov, the governor of the Vinnytsia region in west-central Ukraine, said on Telegram that a rocket had fallen “on civilian objects”, causing what he called “destruction” but no deaths or injuries.
Local officials in the cities of Zaporizhzhia in the south and Kharkiv in the northeast, and the Cherkasy region in central Ukraine, said that said Russian strikes hit critical infrastructure. Part of the Cherkasy region was without power, an official there said.
Ukrainian officials denounced the attacks against civilian infrastructure, which come as Russian forces are straining to hold back Ukrainian counteroffensives in the east and south of Ukraine.
“Instead of fighting on the battlefield, Russia fights civilians,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Twitter.
New York Times News Service