Civilians shelter in a metro station during an air raid alert in Kyiv
A barrage of deadly Russian strikes battered Ukraine’s grid on Friday, worsening dire conditions for Ukrainians across the winter-worn country by knocking out water and electricity services in several regions.
The national energy provider warned Ukrainians already braving near freezing temperatures that it could take longer to restore electricity after dozens of Russian missiles targeted key infrastructure sites in the north, south and centre of the country.
“Priority will be given to critical infrastructure: hospitals, water supply facilities, heat supply facilities, sewage treatment plants,” Ukrenergo said in a statement Friday.
Residents of the capital wrapped in winter coats crammed into underground metro stations after air raid sirens rang out early Friday: the ninth wave of Russian aerial bombardments since October.
“I woke up, I saw a rocket in the sky,” Kyiv resident 25-year-old Lada Korovai said. “I saw it and understood that I have to go to the tube.”
“We live in this situation. It’s a war, it’s real war,” she told AFP.
The onslaught is the latest brought by Russian forces to target what Moscow says are military-linked facilities. The air assaults follow a series of embarrassing battlefield defeats for Russia.
– ‘Biggest’ missile attack of invasion –
Ukraine’s second largest city Kharkiv, near the border with Russia, was left without electricity, its mayor said. Oleg Synegubov, head of Kharkiv’s regional adminstration, said later they planned to have power restored by midnight.
The central cities of Poltava and Kremenchuk were also without power and regional officials in Kryvyi Rig, where Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was born, said the airstrikes had hit a residential building.
“A 64-year-old woman and a young couple died. Their little son still remains under the rubble of the house,” the region’s governor Valentyn Reznichenko said, adding that 13 more were injured.
Oleksandr Starukh, head of the frontline Zaporizhzhia region, which houses Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, said more than a dozen Russian missiles had targeted territory under Ukrainian control.
Kyiv meanwhile “withstood one of the biggest missile attacks since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. About 40 missiles were recorded in the capital’s airspace,” regional authorities said in a statement.
Air-defence forces had shot down 37 of them, they added.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the water supply had been disrupted and that the metro had stopped running so people could shelter underground.
“Due to damage to the power system and emergency power outages, subway trains will not run until the end of the day today,” city officials later announced.
The Kyiv metro is a vital resource for the capital, which had a pre-war population of three million. It has been used as a city-wide bomb shelter since the Russian invasion.
– ‘Survive winter’ –
About half of Ukraine’s energy grid has been damaged in sustained attacks and the national provider warned Friday of emergency blackouts because of the “massive” wave of Russian attacks.
In Ukrainian-held Bakhmut — an eastern city at the epicentre of the war — some residents received wood stoves distributed by volunteers, AFP journalists said.
Bakhmut resident, 85-year-old Oleksandra was braving the cold to collect medication at a nearby pharmacy in the Donetsk region city.
“I’ll survive winter. I’ll just walk more to get warm,” the old woman told AFP.
In the south, fresh Russian shelling in Kherson, recently recaptured by Ukraine, killed one person and wounded three more.
Kherson has been subjected to persistent Russian shelling since Moscow’s forces retreated in November and power was cut in the city earlier this week.
The UN humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, Denise Brown, said a woman working as a paramedic for the Ukrainian Red Cross had been killed by Thursday’s strikes on Kherson.
Russian attacks overall killed 14 on Thursday, the deputy head of the Ukrainian presidency Kyrylo Tymoshenko said.
In the Russian-controlled region of Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, Moscow-installed officials said shelling from Kyiv’s forces had killed eight and wounded 23.
– Putin to visit Belarus –
“The enemy is conducting barbaric shelling of cities and districts of the republic,” the Russian-installed leader of Lugansk Leonid Pasechnik said on social media.
Moscow has said the strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure are a response to an explosion on the Kerch bridge connecting the Russian mainland to the Crimean peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.
The Kremlin has said it holds Kyiv ultimately responsible for the humanitarian impact of the strikes for refusing to capitulate to Russian negotiation terms.
But Ukrainian defence officials said this week that its forces had shot down a swarm of more than a dozen Iranian-made attack drones launched at Kyiv, a sign that Western-supplied systems are having an impact.
Separately on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he will visit Belarus next week for talks with his counterpart and ally Alexander Lukashenko.
Minsk said the pair would hold one-on-one talks as well as wider negotiations with their ministers on “Belarusian-Russian integration”.
