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KYIV/Russia has destroyed almost a third of Ukraine’s power stations in the past week, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday, as Moscow rained more missiles down on infrastructure in what Kyiv and the West call a campaign to intimidate civilians.
Missiles struck power stations in the capital Kyiv where they killed three people, and in Kharkiv in the east, Dnipro and Kryvyi Rih in the south, and Zhytomyr in the west, causing blackouts and knocking out water supplies. One man was killed in his flat that was destroyed in Mykolaiv in the south.
“The situation is critical now across the country … The whole country needs to prepare for electricity, water and heating outages,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told Ukrainian television.
Russia has openly acknowledged targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with waves of missile and drone strikes since the start of last week, in what President Vladimir Putin said was legitimate retaliation for a blast on a bridge.
Kyiv and the West say intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime, and the attacks, aimed at leaving Ukrainians with no heat and power as winter arrives, are Putin’s latest tactic to escalate a war his forces are losing.
In a rare acknowledgement of the difficulties Russian forces are facing, their new commander Sergei Surovikin on Tuesday described the military situation in Ukraine as “tense”, especially around the occupied southern city of Kherson.
“The enemy continually attempts to attack the positions of Russian troops,” he told state-owned Rossiya 24 television news channel.
The Russian-installed chief of the Kherson region said some civilians from four towns would be evacuated, citing what he said was the risk of an attack by Kyiv’s forces.
In Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, Reuters heard three explosions in the early hours of Tuesday. A missile completely destroyed one wing of a building in the downtown area, leaving a massive crater.
