Russia ramps up missile strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure

Russian forces fired dozens of cruise missiles at Ukraine’s power infrastructure on Saturday, triggering more electricity blackouts in the latest phase of the eight-month war.

Local officials said the latest barrage of missiles fired at the country’s infrastructure was the most intense yet in a campaign that started earlier this month to deplete Ukraine’s power stations and other infrastructure ahead of winter.

The campaign, which Russian president Vladimir Putin launched on October 10, has been condemned by Kyiv’s western backers, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz who last week described it as a “war crime”.

“Another rocket attack from terrorists who are fighting against civilian infrastructure and people,” Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a Telegram channel post on Saturday.

Ukraine’s air force command said in a statement that the “massive” strikes, launched at 7am, targeted critical infrastructure and involved the launch of at least 33 cruise missiles, 18 of which were knocked down by air defence systems. Air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv and other cities after the statement, suggesting that additional strikes were happening.

Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s state power grid company, said “the scale of damage” from Saturday’s attack “is comparable or may exceed the consequences of the attack on October 10-12” .

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Zelenskyy’s administration, said Saturday’s strikes had cut off electricity for nearly 1.5mn Ukrainians in the affected regions.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser in Zelenskyy’s administration, reported hits to power infrastructure and blackouts in cities including Khmelnytsky, Lutsk and Rivne in western Ukraine, as well as the southern Black Sea port city of Odesa. Photos and videos posted on social media showed plumes of smoke rising from the cities and other regions. The number of casualties was not immediately clear.

“We are paying the price for freedom,” Arestovych said in a Telegram channel post.

The capital Kyiv was also targeted, but all five incoming missiles were intercepted, Arestovych added.

Lieutenant-general Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for Russia’s defence ministry, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as telling journalists during a Saturday briefing that air strikes had destroyed a fuel depot in central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region as well as a missile factory in Kharkiv in the north-east. Interfax’s reports did not cite him mentioning the strikes on Ukrainian power infrastructure.

Ukraine last week introduced scheduled rolling blackouts in cities and towns across the country to conserve power as officials reported that 30-40 per cent of generation capacity had been damaged during nearly two weeks of air strikes. The authorities also asked citizens to conserve power.

Ukraine’s energy minister German Galushchenko and DTEK, the country’s largest thermoelectric power generation company, appealed last week to foreign countries and producers to help secure a speedy supply of power grid parts needed for repairs.

Ukraine has described the latest strikes as Russia’s retaliation for the counteroffensives by its army this autumn in far eastern and southern coastal regions that have liberated swaths of previously Russian-occupied territory.

The two weeks of air strikes, which have been conducted using cruise missiles and Iranian Shahed kamikaze drones, come as Russia’s army, which still holds more than 15 per cent of Ukrainian territory, prepares for a battle around the strategic southern city of Kherson.

Russia’s occupying forces last week started evacuating civilians from Kherson, which they captured early in the invasion, warning that Ukraine’s forces were advancing towards the city.

Kherson is a strategic port city where the Dnipro River flows into the Black Sea, and is the only provincial capital Russia has captured since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.