Overnight Russian strikes left more than 850,000 people without electricity in Ukraine, the Ukrainian energy company DTEK reported on Sunday. According to the company, Russian forces launched a massive attack on the energy sector. The target was key facilities in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, the company said.
More than 600,000 residents of the Pavlohrad, Samar, Kamianske and Dnipro districts, as well as the city of Dnipro itself, were left without power. Authorities later said that supply is gradually being restored in the region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that power outages are widespread across the country.
He mentioned the Kharkiv region in the northeast and the Zhytomyr region in the northwest, where he said 140 residential buildings were left without heating after a Russian attack. Local authorities in Kharkiv reported that around 250,000 subscribers in the region had been left without power, but that it has already been restored.
Russia has again begun to intensify attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as winter approaches. It is exploiting the shortage of interceptor missiles in Kyiv in an effort to break Ukraine’s resistance. Over the past week, Zelenskyy said, Russian forces fired 115 missiles, almost 1,900 guided aerial bombs and more than 3,000 attack drones against Ukraine.
On Sunday morning, he said Russia had also launched a drone attack at the site of a recent strike in Komyshuvakha. Rescue teams are carrying out search operations after a bombardment on Monday that killed at least 55 people. Unfortunately, there may still be people under the rubble.
Cynicism and absolute brutality, the Ukrainian leader wrote on X. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said Russia deliberately attacked emergency service workers at the scene, but that no one was injured. Monday’s attacks, which hit a school that Kyiv said was being used for humanitarian purposes, followed a rare localized ceasefire between Kyiv and Moscow.
That ceasefire allowed the evacuation of people from the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in the southern Kherson region. One person was killed and three others were injured in an attack on a residential area in Dnipro on Sunday, according to Oleksandr Hanzha, head of the regional military administration. A fire broke out.
At least one private house was destroyed. People are believed to be trapped under the rubble, he said. Zelenskyy has accused the Kremlin of intensifying attacks in an effort to increase pressure on Ukraine’s negotiating position. This comes ahead of the planned trilateral talks between Kyiv, Moscow and Washington in Abu Dhabi.