KIEV (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday condemned Russian strikes on his country overnight and early on Tuesday as “despicable” and said they involved more than 100 missiles of various types and about 100 Shahed drones.
The Ukrainian leader said there were deaths and dozens of injuries and that the attack had caused significant damage to Ukraine’s energy sector.
“Like most previous Russian strikes, this one was equally vicious, targeting vital civilian infrastructure. Most of our regions – from the Kharkiv region and Kyiv to Odessa and our western regions,” Zelensky said.
The shelling began around midnight and continued after dawn in what appeared to be the largest Russian attack against Ukraine in weeks.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Monday morning that Russian forces had fired drones, cruise missiles and Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missiles at 15 Ukrainian regions — more than half the country.
“The energy infrastructure has once again become a target for Russian terrorists. Unfortunately, there is damage in a number of regions,” Shmyhal said, adding that Ukraine’s state-owned electricity grid operator, Ukrynergo, had to implement emergency power outages to stabilize the system.
Ukraine’s allies have called for Kiev to be provided with long-range weapons and allowed to use them on targets inside Russia.
“In order to stop the barbaric shelling of Ukrainian cities, it is necessary to destroy the place from which Russian missiles are launched. We are counting on the support of our allies and we will certainly make Russia pay the price,” Shmyhal said.
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, there were several groups of Russian drones moving towards the eastern, northern, southern and central regions of Ukraine, followed by numerous cruise and ballistic missiles.
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that the attacks used “long-range precision-fired weapons from the air, from the sea and drones against vital energy infrastructure facilities that support the operation of the military-industrial complex in Ukraine. All designated targets were hit.”
Explosions were heard in the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the city’s electricity and water supplies had been disrupted by the attack.
At least four people were killed — one in the western city of Lutsk, one in the central Dnepropetrovsk region, one in Zhytomyr in the center of the country and one in the partially occupied Zaporizhia region in the southeast, according to local officials. Another 13 were wounded — one in the Kyiv region surrounding the Ukrainian capital, five in Lutsk, three in the southern Mykolaiv region and four in the neighboring Odessa region.
Power outages and damage to civilian infrastructure and residential buildings were reported across the country, from the Sumy region in the east, to the Mykolaiv and Odessa regions in the south, to the Rivne region in the west.
In Sumy, a province in the east of the country on the border with Russia, the local administration said 194 villages were completely without electricity, while 19 others were partially without power.
Ukrainian private energy company D-Tec announced emergency power outages, saying in an online statement that “energy workers across the country are working 24/7 to restore light in Ukrainians’ homes.”
In the wake of the shelling and power outages, regional officials across Ukraine were ordered to open “invincibility points” — shelter-like places where people can charge their devices and get refreshments during power outages, Prime Minister Shmyhal said. Such points were first opened in Ukraine in the fall of 2022, when Russia targeted the country’s energy infrastructure with weekly bombing.
In neighboring Poland, the military said Polish and NATO air defenses were activated in the eastern part of the country as a result of the attack.
Meanwhile, officials in Russia reported a Ukrainian drone attack overnight and Monday morning.
Four people were injured in the Saratov region of central Russia, where drones struck residential buildings in two cities. Local officials said one drone crashed into a residential tower in Saratov, and another hit a residential building in Engels, home to a military airport that has been previously attacked.
The Russian Defense Ministry said a total of 22 Ukrainian drones were intercepted overnight and in the morning over eight regions, including the Saratov and Yaroslavl regions in central Russia.
Russia also said its forces had repelled Ukrainian attempts to advance toward half a dozen settlements in the Kursk region, where Ukraine launched an incursion this month that caught Russia by surprise.
The fighting in the Kursk region has raised concerns about the nuclear power plant there. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, announced that he would lead a group inspection visit to the plant on Tuesday.
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